Yesterday, John Prescott announced he has decided to give up use of the grace-and- favour country house of Dorneywood traditionally reserved for deputy PMs. He was doing so, he claimed, because the kerfuffle surrounding his continued use of it, after having been stripped of his former responsibilities in that office in last month’s cabinet reshuffle, was preventing him fulfilling his remaining ones in that office -- whatever they are!
The immediate occasion of his decision was the publication in the press last week of photographs of him and his colleagues hard at work there during a supposed away day last Thursday ... playing croquet.
Would that he and his colleagues had always been equally as diligent during their years in office.
Then the country might not be in the very serious mess in which it appears they have deposited it as a result of their misgovernance of it.
About the only decent thing the present government has done during its time in office in my opinion -- and I am aware this view is by no means widely shared by all its supporters, let alone its critics -- is to have joined the US in regime change in Iraq. Everything else to which they have turned their over-zealous hands has turned to ashes.
As opinion-polls begin to register a swing of the electoral pendulum back to the Tories, who, after managing to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of the public by adroitly repositioning themselves in the centre-ground, patiently bide their time before enough former Labour voters have become sufficiently disenchanted with the present government to be willing to vote Tory, it is worth taking stock of New Labour’s record in office. For that party came to power promising so much and it has delivered so little.
Indeed, had New Labour been less manically active, the country would now be in far better shape than it presently is. Had more of Blair’s cronies frittered away their time while in office playing croquet or other more grown up away games, how much better off might we and they all now be?
Consider the domestic policy initiatives New Labour took in a blaze of publicity heralding the bright new dawn they were to bring and consider how badly they have lived up to promise.
The Human Rights Act was designed to provide citizens with greater security against the state, yet all it has done is to have opened the flood-gates of anarchy, by preventing the government from being able to fight effectively against terror as well as to be able to deport foreign criminals.
The government promised that it would get tough on crime and the causes of crime while in office, but its failure to increase prison capacity has meant that now all but the most serious offenders escape incarceration and with violent knife crimes threatening to escalate out of control, not to mention drug use and drunk and disorderly behaviour having become rife among young people.
The government’s much vaunted tax-credit system was designed to help the poorest families but appears only to have brought them misery, as its faulty working has first thrown money at them and then demanded it back after they had spent it.
Meanwhile, the Chancellor’s promise to each new-born baby of a trust fund savings account has come to naught as more than a third of families fail to apply for the requisitie voucher with which to open the account for their child.
‘Education, education, education’, we were told was to be New Labour’s priority in office. Yet what has all the extra billions the government has spent on education actually achieved? Today we learn from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority that over half the number of school-leavers complete their eleven years of compulsory education without their having achieved what it considers to be the basic literacy and numeracy needed for adult life.
Meanwhile those school-leavers who have been gulled into going into higher education and who are about to graduate find themselves in danger of not being able to get their degree certificates in time to gain a job because the lecturers unions are locked in a pay struggle with their hugely over-paid managers and are refusing to grade papers unless their demand for a 23% pay rise is met.
So far as the NHS goes which New Labour promised would be so much safer in its hands, we read it has squandered billions on a new computer record system which is both behind schedule as well as massively over-budget. Meanwhile, so it is reported today, because of short-falls in the service despite massive cash injections in recent years, 4000 much needed trainee-doctors face imminent redundancy in a desperate attempt by NHS managers to balance the books.
As for the government’s promise to curb bogus asylum seekers and the number of illegal immigrants, we read today that it has long been and apparently continues to be the official policy of the Department for Work and Pensions to turn a blind eye to applications for national insurance numbers, with all the entitlement to free welfare services their issuance brings, from those it suspects have no genuine right to them.
Oh, that members of the present government could have been granted grace and favour houses a plenty along with full pensions on their gaining office, upon the condition of their having promised not to interfere in any way with how the country was previously being run before they took office.
In sum, as the days of the present government draw to their inexorable end, the final record on their time in office has to be that they could and should have tried far less hard.