Inside Politics

NEW LABOUR IS FOR U-TURNING

From cannabis to student tuition fees, it's been a rare week since the
election that the Government has not performed an about-face Labour's
second term

When the chief whip made her unsuccessful attempt to gag and truss Paul
Marsden, she told the awkward Labour backbencher that he had to support the
military action in Afghanistan because 'it's government policy'. Hilary
Strongarm would have behaved like an exasperated parent who has run out of
rational arguments - 'because I say so' - if the stroppy MP's dispute with
his leaders was about health, education or crime.

But here's the problem. And it's a growing problem even for - perhaps
especially for - the most pager-enslaved hoplites on the Labour benches.

It is difficult to be entirely confident from day to day exactly what is
government policy.

Imagine yourself to be an on-message Labour MP. The antithesis of that
bolshie self-publicist Marsden, you take pride in defending your government
through thick, thin and thinner.

On Tuesday morning, you staunchly defend the Government's stance of zero
tolerance towards drugs.

Loyal to the line long decreed by Number 10, you fiercely denounce the very
idea that the categorisation of cannabis should be relaxed so that
possession of the giggleweed is treated like a traffic offence.

So what if this reform has been advocated by expert opinion, including
senior police officers?

You hotly reply that it will send a deplorable signal that society is soft
on drugs. This, after all, is what Ministers have been saying for more than
four years.

Imagine your embarrassment come Tuesday afternoon when David Blunkett
suddenly declares a reversal in the law's treatment of cannabis users. The
Home Secretary is now going to do almost precisely what the Government has
previously condemned.

A really unfortunate loyalist Labour MP would have got up on Thursday
morning valiantly to defend Individual Learning Accounts as the cutting
edge of the Government's crusade to bring lifelong education to the nation.
Another day, another U-turn as Estelle Morris announces that the scheme
will be indefinitely suspended.

In the space of 72 hours, two Cabinet Ministers slammed on the brakes, spun
the wheel 180 degrees and screeched off in the opposite direction.

David Blunkett's reversal is one of the more elegantly executed U-turns.
First, because it is popular.

Second, because politicians usually find it easier to ditch an unworkable
policy when it is not their own baby, but an orphan inherited from a
predecessor. Applying the law as it stands wastes police resources better
devoted to pursuing the barons of hard drugs; expecting the police not to
apply the law makes a mockery of it. This was apparent to just about
everyone except some of the denizens of Jack Straw's Home Office. They
seemed more detached from the real world than an inveterate skankhead.

Mr Straw would have found it much harder to eat platefuls of his hardline
rhetoric about cannabis.

Which makes the case for moving Ministers around from time to time. The
Home Secretary who created asylum vouchers would also have much more
difficulty scrapping them, another U-turn which is planned by Mr Blunkett.

It was a case of the emergency stop in respect of Individual Learning
Accounts. Here is a policy with a worthy end which goes seriously awry
because too little care went into the means of the delivery.

The scheme has proved to be much more costly than anticipated when this
'flagship' was launched by Gordon Brown. Strangely enough, the Chancellor
was nowhere to be seen when it was scuttled.

The people most enriched by these accounts have been fraudsters. Mark that
retreat as Ministers learning that governing is a more complicated business
than dressing up ill-conceived policies with snappy slogans.

Two major reversals in the space of three days is remarkable. What is more
striking still is that this fits a pattern since the election.

It has been a pretty rare week since it was re-elected that the Government
has not made a U-turn of one sort or another.

There have been retreats under duress.

Pressure from Europe forced the Government to concede workers'
consultation; lobbying by the unions killed the idea of making it cost up
to UKP 10,000 to sue an employer for unfair dismissal. There have been
changes that indicate adjustments to New Labour's ideological posture which
should be welcome to the Left. The line on excessive executive pay, as
enunciated by Chairman Blair himself as recently as last month, was that
this was solely a matter for the market. In the wake of recent outcries
about obscene pay-offs, Patricia Hewitt is now to give shareholders new
powers to spay the creaming fat cats.

Under New Labour, even trains are capable of making U-turns. Throughout
their first term, Ministers scoffed at the thought of renationalising
Railtrack. I recall the idea being put to Tony Blair at the launch of his
election manifesto.

He looked at his questioner as though she had parachuted in from
cloud-cuckoo-land. The Government was equally derisive of the notion of the
non-profit-making company when one was proposed as an alternative to
privatising air traffic control.

Now that they have effectively renationalised Railtrack, what is the
long-term solution favoured by the Government? Yes, a non-profit-making
company.

Tyre marks are to be seen on virtually every road in Whitehall. You could
be forgiven for thinking that the greatest priority of New Labour's second
term is unravelling the misbegotten experiments of its first term. Estelle
Morris, with the scrapping of AS levels and the about-turn on student
tuition fees, achieves a triple whammy of U-turns for education.

Her record is matched by Alan Milburn. The Health Secretary has abandoned
targeting hospital waiting-lists to concentrate on the lengthening waiting
times. The Department of Health has also reversed on treating NHS patients
abroad and in private hospitals.

Mr Milburn hailed the latter as a 'new initiative'. What all these U-turns
have in common is that no Minister will call them a U-turn. One of the
legacies of Margaret Thatcher was the blackening of the idea that a
politician should be allowed to change his or her mind. 'You turn if you
want to, the lady is not for turning,' she boasted.

John Major's weak government gave U-turns an even worse name. Tony Blair
has played up to the image, misleading though it is, that he is
unyieldingly Thatcheresque. 'Back bone, not back down,' he once told his
party conference when he was trying to imitate the Iron Lady.

I appreciate why Ministers are so coy about conceding that they have done
the U thing.

They fear that it will be taken as evidence of either blithering
incompetence or terminal feebleness - and sometimes it is. But I reckon
there's something to be said in favour of the U-turn. Thank God that even
the IRA is capable of it. Had republicans stuck to the old theology of 'not
a bullet, not an ounce', then the prospect of peace in Northern Ireland
would not be brighter than it has been for generations.

Consistency is often a virtue, but it can also be a wildly overrated one.
Better the Minister who alters course than the Minister who blunders on
into ever deeper levels of mess. With generals, knowing when to retreat is
a skill to be as prized as knowing when to advance.

The focus groups told Tony Blair that student tuition fees were the single
most unpopular policy introduced by his government - apart from higher fuel
taxes and the miserly 75p pension increase, two more cases of New Labour
retreating under popular pressure. Ministers have been rightly concerned
that the drugs laws lack credibility among so many young people who are
generally alienated from the governing class.

We can scorn this allegedly control-freakish gang for listening, adjusting
and trying to learn from their mistakes.

Or we might raise half a cheer for Ministers who grasp they commit errors
and, even if they hate admitting to them, at least try to make amends.

I'm minded to encourage them. Contrary to Margaret Thatcher, I say to the
Government: U-turn if you want to.