A BBC presenter suggested yesterday morning to Wes Streeting, the Defence Secretary, that politicians have been postponing the reform of social care for 30 years because it would be appallingly expensive, and that Andy Burnham will procrastinate in his turn.
Streeting retorted that because Burnham has come out so soon on the subject of social care reform, and made such a serious statement of intent, we shall “finally see the triumph of hope over experience”.
The Defence Secretary has apparently not read the greatest biography in the English language, Boswell’s Live of Johnson, in which the following anecdote is found:
“A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.”
Johnson was on the side of experience – direct and truthful observation of human nature as it really is – and had an infallible ear for cant.
The great mass of Labour supporters gathered at the conference in Liverpool have surrendered to the cant for which their new leader has such a marked talent. They believe they are participating in the triumph of hope.
The words “Hope Again” adorn the conference, and as if the year were 1945, the party once more places its faith in state action, i.e. the rule of bureaucrats. Burnham proclaims that the answer to the social care question is to set up an organisation modelled on the National Health Service.
State ownership of railway companies is the way forward, British Steel has been saved by bringing it back into public hands, councils will once again build houses, and Margaret Thatcher will at long last be defeated.
One awaited the speech at noon yesterday of John Healey, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a certain interest. Would he go along with this wishful thinking? Would he too surrender to the misty nostalgia of the soft Left?
Does he too maintain that the already vast state bureaucracy should have its powers extended? Does he fail to see that this bureaucracy is by its nature expensive, inflexible, illiberal, unimaginative and unenterprising, crowds out private and charitable provision, is unable to distinguish between real and pretended need, and invariably puts its own interests ahead of those of the public?
Healey’s speech was tactful. He used the word “hope” with great frequency, and placed himself securely in the tradition not of Tony Blair, a man who appealed to Middle England by antagonising the Labour Party, but of Gordon Brown, for whom Healey once worked, from whom he still receives advice in block capitals in the middle of the night, and to whom at a Labour conference in the late 1990s he lent the red tie which he, Healey, was wearing yesterday.
So far so red, and so nostalgic. But Healey proceeded to warn the conference that times have changed: the money New Labour had at its disposal in the 1990s is now “simply not there”, and what is more,
“It is simply not progressive to allow a bigger and bigger benefits bill.”
A million young people, he declared, must be rescued from the subsidised idleness to which the state has consigned them: “This is a moral duty.”
Healey paid tribute to his predecessor, Rachel Reeves, but sounded more grown-up than she did, and avoided imitating her reckless habit of flying pre-Budget kites.
He will deliver his first Budget on 28th October, at which point we should gain a firmer idea of how willing he is to defy his own backbenchers.
The Parliamentary Labour Party is dominated by the soft Left. Its members got where they are today by advocating higher public spending as the answer to every problem.
Most of them have never done proper jobs. Their experience is often of third-sector organisations, which in many cases were founded by brave and original people to meet crying needs, but have in recent decades surrendered their independence to the state, from which they now receive much of their funding, and of which they have become enfeebled arms.
Labour MPs feel a conscientious desire to help the poorest members of society. That is one reason why they went into politics.
But they consider this duty to help the poor can best be fulfilled by campaigning for more state intervention. Compassion is delegated to the state, because, it is contended, only the state possesses the universal reach, organising power and resources which are required.
Nobody has put the case against this way of thinking better than William Blake:
“He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars:
General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.”
So can we expect Healey to begin in the Budget to start to set limits to the ever-expanding welfare state? Pat McFadden, the Work and Pensions Secretary, declared quite plainly in his conference speech on Sunday afternoon that this is what will happen in the coming years. He warned Labour MPs:
“This status quo is not a system around which to circle the wagons. It’s a system to change so that we can give a chance to life for the people it too often signs off and writes off.”
Opposition would be easier for the Conservative Party if the Government could be relied on always to do the wrong thing. A time may instead be approaching when Conservatives have to give some credit to Healey, McFadden and Burnham for attempting, in defiance of the great mass of statist Labour backbenchers, to do the right thing.