Gove it your all.

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It’s intriguing to read Michael Gove’s speech today on Gordon Brown, widely plugged by various Tory journalists radical, free thinking bloggers as the definitive Tory take on Gordon Brown.

 

Gove starts off by comparing Brown to a number of political figures. The intention is presumably to show that Brown is destined to be both a loser and a failure in domestic policy, though quite how comparing him to the famously hyper-active and over-achieving David Lloyd-George and Lyndon Johnson does that, I don’t know.

 

The scene set, Gove then enters into what I would term the heart of his analysis.

 

He claims that Brown is a diverted idealist, one who has compromised so much with the need to get power, that he no longer understand why or what he stands for.

“In order to defeat the Conservatives, and win eventually in 1997, Gordon Brown helped change Labour – and in the process he himself changed.”He had to learn to accept constraints on public spending – although in his heart he did not believe in them.”He had to recognise the new individualism which social change had brought about – although in his heart he could not reconcile himself to it.

And he has had to accept that the attachments which stir British hearts are not those which once stirred his – and it leaves an aching emptiness inside.”

This is a very odd accusation for an ardent Cameron supporter to make. The entire Cameron project has been to try and persuade us that Cameron has made precisely this compromise with the British people, so why is it such a crime of Browns?

To recap; the scale of what Cameron says he has accepted from New Labour is staggering. Amongst other things, Cameron says he has accepted need for more public spending, the need to make improving public services the heart of policy, the need not to cut tax, the need to maintain the devolution settlement and accept the social changes of the last ten years.

If any group of  people can be described as “having to accept that the attachments that stir British hearts are not those which once stirred theirs” it is the Conservative front bench. 

So is this analysis about Brown, or is the aching emptiness Gove describes a commentary on his own feelings?  After all, Gove goes straight on to confess that the British people were right to want more attention (Attention? Can’t he bring himself to say investment?) for public services. Perhaps making that admission leaves Michael “achingly empty inside” too.

 

Gove’s point is that giving up principle is the reason Brown is desperate to hang on to power:

 “Because acquiring power has involved a sacrifice of so much, in terms of youthful idealism, the surrender of any power is an acutely painful exercise to contemplate.” 

 

This insight into the PMs soul is interesting but unevidenced. Gove talks about Brown appointing ministers as if this was proof that Brown, alone of all politicians, clings to power via patronage, but he doesn’t talk about actual instances where Brown has failed to surrender power.

 

 

This matters because he’s talking about the man who has made the Bank of England independent; is making the Qualifications Authority independent;  is considering an independent NHS  and is giving more powers to parliament over war, over scrutiny of ministers and over the executive. 

 

To bear scrutiny an argument like this needs to be more than psychological frippery. It needs to have some basis in fact. Gove could argue that these are insignificant concessions, but surely he can’t just ignore them and hope not to be caught?

 

To explain this apparent discrepancy between his rhetoric and reality, Gove talks about central power over public services. He first suggests that all Labour’s investment in public services has come to naught. It’s the usual line for any Conservative confronted with a government investing in public services. “It’s not doing any good” or the more sophisticated “it’s not doing enough good”.

 

Gove shies away from any meaningful metrics on Public Service performance because he knows they’re against him. School standards are up, numbers of teachers, nurses, doctors and police are up, crime is down, Waiting lists have plummeted, death rates from major diseases have fallen, there are new hospitals and new schools in abundance.  

So at all costs a discussion of overall public sector performance must be avoided. Gove can only get so far by talking about efficiency before he gets dragged into that debate, so “targets” become the bugbear of choice.

Yet here too we find incoherence. Gove decries the idea that the state should seek to manage via targets, implying they are pointless, but then in the next sentence he attacks the Government for not doing better on those same targets- presumably making them worthwhile.

 

Gove says government needs to stop the “scandal” of children leaving primary school with below average literacy and numeracy. The current rate is 43%. One assumes he thinks a lower number would be better. Would that lower number be a target? Or would Gove prefer a woolly “aspiration” that reduces the ability of a future Conservative Schools Secretary to be held to account for his successes and failures?

 

The fact that Gove relies on such a lightweight response says a lot about the lack of depth in Conservative thinking. This is shown again when Gove moves on to public service reform. After listing a number of Labour reforms to public services he accuses Ed Balls of freezing reform and says:

 “If new academies are denied any real freedom to innovate, to provide a diverse way of operating, to escape from bureaucratic capture, then how can they provide the choice we need and generate the improvements we seek?” 

Yet this is a man who only last week sought to tell every school in the country how they should regulate their uniforms, how their desks should be laid out and how lunchtimes should be regulated. Where is the freedom to innovate there?

 

What Gove does to elide this contradiction is create a division between “professionals” and “bureaucrats”. It’s a simple trick. One groups needs to be trusted to do whatever they like while the other should be stifled wherever they rear their head. Then it can be said that Brown gives power to the latter, agents of his centralising state, while Gove would distribute it to the former, the free, independent agents of change.

 

But how does one sensibly distinguish between a “professional” and a “bureaucrat”? For Gove it’s simple. Who-ever agrees with his prejudices about policy is a professional, and whoever doesn’t is a bureaucrat. So, Professionals say that all A&Es must remain as they are, no matter what cost or medical effectiveness they offer, and they must be listened to. Only Bureaucrats argue that services should be reconfigured.

Professionals want more uniforms, streaming in schools and regulated lunch breaks. Bureaucrats want casual teaching, five minute lessons and informal dress. (This is particularly interesting, because the evidence is that the biggest beneficiary of the Swedish educational reforms Gove advocates are the schools that teach in the way he says is most destructive.)

 

Gove’s whole thesis is that the problem for Gordon Brown is that he cannot reach out and trust us to make our own decisions.  Yet his (and David Camerons) sunny optimism about devolving power has its roots in a policy so controversial that he dare not discuss it, instead talking about trusting professionals as if this were a cure for all the problems of Public Service provision.

 

Gove and his leader pretend that there is no issue in public services that cannot be resolved by simply “allowing people to get on with the job”, when that is patently not the case. This contradiction at the heart of his critique becomes clear when he steps away from attacking Brown and onto his own policy agenda. Gove says:

 “A genuinely post-bureaucratic vision for the public services recognises that its empowered citizens, capable of holding producers to account, in a system which promotes pluralism and diversity, which enables services to improves fastest. And in a post-bureaucratic world the moral imperative to spread opportunity more equally can be accomplished best by giving citizens not just more resources to secure better services but the power to choose.” 

There’s a real idea hidden here, if one peers past the flowery rhetoric.

 

It’s allowing money to follow the consumer through the system, through vouchers, through patients passports and the like.  But real ideas have consequences. The consequence of this idea is that some hospitals will close. Some services will find themselves starved of resources as patients vote with their feet. That might be good in market based terms, but it will lead to a huge conflict with the interests of the providers of those services (and also the interests of those pupils and patients left behind).

 

So the Headteacher Gove praised last week for preserving blazers will have to sack teachers because a Montesorri school opens next door. The doctors he speaks of so approvingly will find that their beloved A&E isn’t bringing in enough money to survive because the town they serve is too small.  

 

So where does trust lie? Gove alleges that Brown cannot trust citizens to decide what public services they want, but Gove cannot even trust himself to spell out what the consequences of his proposals actually are.

 

Unsurprisingly, rather than linger here, Gove moves away from public services into housing. He starts by alleging that “for the first time in recorded history, the number of homeowners has fallen under this Government”. That’s an odd suggestion as there are 2 million more homeowners now than in 1997.  

 

He then attacks Brown for not doing enough to support homebuilding. I don’t know if he noticed, but Gordon Brown’s first Green paper was on housing. Amazingly, it contained the very incentives to build, proposals for planning reform and support for infrastructure investment that Gove accuses him of ignoring. I’m not sure if this ignorance is deliberate or not, but it’s quite astounding.

This is a speech that pretends to debate policy but only distorts it, that cloaks itself in thoughtfulness while using rhetorical tricks to hide from its own intellectual incoherence. This is a speech of a party afraid to engage on the issues and a man who hopes that by declaring his opponent out for the count, exhausted and without energy, he might actually make it so.

What this speech does not do, and what it cannot do, is provide a coherent account of what Gordon Brown might do in office. This is because the new Conservatives strange relationship with their own policy agenda makes serious debate anathema. Like a naughty schoolboy, all Gove can do is make a few rude remarks, then run away, hoping that it is the jibes that will be remembered, not the intellectual cowardice that underlies them.

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