Scandals and Speakers come and go, clamours and controversies build, explode and fade. The enduring Big Question of British politics is about public services. How do we make our schools, our hospitals and our police forces responsive and accountable to those who use them? How do we reward those who perform well and penalise those who fail the public? How do we encourage innovation among the professionals while at the same maintaining minimum national standards? How do we maximise the bang we get for all those taxpayers' bucks? Whoever can find the complete answer will have reached the Holy Grail.
Labour has been on this quest for more than a decade. Tomorrow, the government will present its latest answer when Gordon Brown unveils "Building Britain's Future", an attempt to relaunch his premiership which he will not call a relaunch. Here are some of the phrases I predict you will hear from the lips of Mr Brown and his ministers. We will be promised a "radical gear change". They will talk about "unlocking innovation" among those who deliver services and an "information revolution" to empower those who rely on them. It will be presented as a plan which is "radical about power while being realistic about money".
Ah yes, money. This government has poured unprecedented sums into public services. Total spending on the NHS has more than doubled in real terms since it came to power. Spending on education has grown by nearly two-thirds. The laziest accusation against Labour is that all those resources have been wasted. That isn't true. In 1997, more than 300,000 people waited more than six months for NHS treatment. Ten years later, the number had fallen to fewer than 1,000. There are a record number of police officers. The school building stock, neglected for a quarter of a century before New Labour came to power, has been completely renovated.
What is worth arguing about is whether all that money has been and is being spent effectively. Some hospitals are still so incompetent that they kill patients they should be curing. More than 30,000 16-year-olds are still leaving school each year without a single GCSE to their names. There are wild variations in the performance of different constabularies because the police remain the great untouchable when it comes to public service reform.
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