Why Mr Hague cannot score
Special report: Tories in opposition

Guardian

Monday January 15, 2001

The Sunday Times, we can safely say, did not intend its "league table" of hospitals to be read as anything but criticism of Labour's record. Yet Alan Milburn was able yesterday almost to embrace the (unsurprising) finding that there are wide variations in health performance, as measured by patient deaths and other crude indices. It is why, he said, Labour set up its own auditing body, the commission on health improvement. Such figures justified the hugely ambitious national plan for health promulgated last year, but only to get going after this April. The health secretary sounded convincing partly because he has so little opposition to contend with from the Tories. William Hague, who is still endowed with serried centres for policy studies, should yesterday have whipped from his back pocket a patented plan for health service reform. He could not do that for a very good reason. He has proved unwilling to rethink Thatcherite dogmatism about the public services and the public still believe him in his heart to be a one-club privatiser. He is not yet, to put it bluntly, social democratic enough. That is why his electoral standing remains as desperate as yesterday's Mori and NOP polls said.

It is not as if a more credible Hague would lack grounds for attacking the government. Labour's approach to the NHS is increasingly "Bevanite". Tony Blair sounds as if he wants to be held responsible for every dropped bedpan in every ward. In education, too, this centralising approach has got stronger. The logic of league tables for schools and surgery is yet more central intervention to secure uniform standards. The danger is that teachers and nurses spend their time ticking boxes, afraid to use their professional initiative.

Here, you might think, is fertile territory for an opposition that knows it must convince the public of its competence in running public services by addressing practical problems. Once, the Tories were the local party, advocates of the littleplatoons and all. Now, they are fixated on the private sector as the panacea for all ills. Their plans for private health insurance and school selection would provide more diversity, true, but at the expense of cutting poorer people out. Service for all, regardless of means, can only be provided in the public sector. Until the Tories get that message and its fiscal consequences, they deserve their likely electoral fate.