No matter how deeply ‘New Labour’ buys into the Thatcherite free market legacy, if you scratch a bit, you’ll always find the residue of Gosplan hanging about. Tony Blair has thrown out a remarkable speech about targetting future problem children prior to birth.
His own words tell it best in this quote from a BBC interview: “If we are not prepared to predict and intervene far more early then there are children that are going to grow up in families that we know perfectly well are completely dysfunctional, and the kids a few years down the line are going to be a menace to society and actually a threat to themselves,”
There are loads of details in the new labour plans on tacking social exclusion, all dressed up in phrasing which seeks to frame the plans as being the actions of a government which has a responbility to get value for money when providing welfare to single mothers, which is hard to argue against, and being strong on law and order, which we all want, but the bottom line is that kids will be branded as ‘at risk’ even prior to birth, and treated no so much as people who need a hand up to give them a fair start, but as potential criminals to be monitored.
When so much of modern politics is about marketing and branding, the langauge used, which is overwhelmingly negative, brands these unborn kids as ‘bad’ and their families as failures.This is new language from New Labour, and I don’t like it. Back in 1945, when Clem Atlee and the boys were profundly and niavely wedded to controlling the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, they spoke in positive terms of building a ‘new Jerusalem’ but Tony Blair seems to be thinking more in terms of some new juvenile prisons.
At the heart of the problem, once you strip away all the window dressing, is the assumption that all people are not in fact equal at birth, but that some are naturally bad and are a problem to be resolved. That leads you down the path that Hayek warned of when he coined the phrase ‘gosplan to gulag’ in his critique of state power, ‘The Road to Serfdom’ which is still required reading as long as poeple like Blair come out with policies like that.
Addendum, 9th Sept. I found a remarkable quote in today’s Guardian piece by John Harris:’Schools are prospering, but the recent education bill was built on the idea of a system characterised by failure…’ which suggests that a focus on failure has eaten its way into the heart of the New Labour project and injected a note of desperation into policy formation in many areas. Of course, if you believe you have failed, the voters will certainly agree with you
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