Things Could Have Only Got Better

Friday 2nd May 1997. It only seems like yesterday. The hopes of millions of Britons rested with the new Labour government. After eighteen years of Tory rule Britain was ready for a change.

Ten years on, here is the clinical, rambling analysis of what the Labour government has achieved.

Under this Labour government there is now a minimum wage and everyone has the right to join a trade union but it was perfectly legal for an American to sack 670 Gate Gourmet employees via megaphone and for Mark Langford to sack 2,500 Accident Group employees via SMS text.

The gap between the rich and poor is wider now than it was ten years ago. The government may trumpet the fact that several hundred thousand children have been taken out of poverty but this, like so much of New Labour’s spin, is a subversion of the facts. In absolute terms poverty has fallen. But in relative terms, where people’s income is compared to average income, poverty has actually risen over the past ten years. One of the reasons for this is that it is the middles classes who have benefited the most from the much heralded tax credits. You can be earning as much as £60k and still claim tax credits if you have a child. But if you don't have a child, you could be earning as little as £10k and you wouldn't entitled to a penny in benefits/tax credits.

Hundreds of billions of pounds have been poured into the public sector without any discernible improvement in public services. Where has all this money gone? They have gone into the pockets of the directors of private companies involved in PPP/PFI schemes. They have gone into the pockets of GP's and consultants, most of whom now earn in excess of £100k despite working only part time in the NHS (the rest of their time is spent working in private hospitals or on the golf course). This is happening at the same time as hundreds of thousands of other NHS staff are working on the minimum wage. The government has pampered doctors and nurses but would the NHS function without the services of cleaners, porters, catering and clerical staff?

Hundreds of billions of pounds have been wasted on IT and construction contracts that have cost much more than their budget. Why is every contract between the public sector and private sector written in a so one-sided way that it is the public sector which ends up footing the bill if the project overruns or turns out to be more complex than originally thought? Would this happen in contract between two private companies? When the construction for the new Wembley stadium overran, who ended up paying for this? Certainly not the FA, the client. It was Multiplex, the contractor, who paid for the overrun. Why doesn't this happen in the public sector? Because our politicians and officials are being bribed by the contractors to sign such one-sided contracts.

And who has paid for all this? Certainly not the rich. Tax laws in Britain are now so lax that Britain is now a tax haven. Gone are the days when greedy businessmen and celebrities would hide their fortunes in an obscure Caribbean island. Now they just bring it to Britain. Seven of the top ten in the latest Sunday Times Rich List were born outside the UK.

Tax laws in Britain have also allowed it to become the home of venture capitalists. These scum buy successful companies by taking out vast loans. Tax laws allow these loans to be shown as liabilities of the companies being bought, rather than the venture capitalists. Not only does this remove all the risk associated with the loan from the venture capitalists, the huge interest to be paid on the loan is tax deductible! They then asset strip the companies and sack thousands of employees. Once they've done this they just walk away from the business, having pocketed hundreds of millions. They have raped hundreds of UK companies, including household names such as Rover and the AA. Their eyes are now set on Boots and Sainsbury's.

It is the poorest in society who have ended up paying for this governments waste and corruption. Indirect taxes have been gone up steadily over the past ten years and, by virtue of these taxes being regressive, it is the poor whose tax burden has risen the most.

Education, education, education. That was Bliar’s mantra. Yes, there are many shiny new schools where every pupil has a laptop but, again, what has this achieved? Every August government ministers pat themselves on the back after record passes at GCSEs and A Levels. But this is only achievable by fixing the grades after all the exam papers have been marked. You couldn't make it up. Even under this dodgy way of grading of exams there is growing gap in the qualifications achieved by school leavers. At the same time as record numbers are achieving the top grades, record numbers are leaving school without any qualifications. The savvy middle class are using the property market to corner places in the best schools for their children. If you can’t play this game you’re doomed to send your children to bog standard schools. The government can throw as much money as it can at these schools to improve standards but nothing will change as long as there are ghettos in our education system.

Record number of school leavers may be going to universities but what are they studying? Media studies and sociology. In the country that gave the world the industrial revolution, the number of maths, science and engineering graduates are at record low. In the market orientated world universities operate in now many are simply dropping courses in these subjects. They simply cost to much to run. At the same time China and India are churning out millions of science and engineering graduates every year. One of the few comforts of all our manufacturing jobs going abroad was that at least the designing stage was still being done in Britain. But if these jobs too are exported because a lack of appropriate graduates, what on earth are future British generations going to do for a living? Are they all going to end up working in Tesco, stacking its shelves with goods designed and manufactured abroad?

Another one of New Labour’s buzzwords was ethical foreign policy. It got off to a good start with Kosovo and Sierra Leone but it’s been downhill ever since. Ethics have been abandoned in favour of economics and national interest: China, Palestine, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran etc.

Of all the things done by New Labour in the past ten years, surely giving unconditional support to America in it’s “war on terror” was the most wreckless. Have any “terrorists” been defeated by using military force? The Boers tried to defeat the ANC, whom they and Margaret Thatcher described as terrorists, by using military force but in the end they had to admit defeat and abandon Apartheid. The Jews haven’t been able to defeat the PLO using force. Even the British had to negotiate with IRA/Sinn Fein. You don’t hijack a plane and kill thousands, including yourself, unless it’s the last resort .

Things Can Only Get Better was the anthem of the New Labour victory in 1997. How wrong it was.