They Refuse To Bow Out Gracefully

John Harris writes:

Never mind that Ed Miliband and his senior colleagues all cut their political teeth during the New Labour years: just as kids eventually leave home and parents must leave them to it, so he and his allies claim to be in the midst of a new era.

The Iraq war was a terrible mistake, inequality is a much bigger issue than the ancien régime ever understood, and look! Labour has rediscovered its belief in the glories of a public NHS.

As Andy Burnham’s somewhat testing  interview on last night’s Newsnight showed, this effort at political escapology is not the easiest of tricks, but still: to quote one of Tony Blair’s more ludicrous outbursts, new, new, everything is new (or, in the sense of Labour trying to rediscover its pre-1990s values, old – but you get the general idea).

Given the cynicism and anger about Labour’s record out there in the real world – some of it unfair, but there we are – this quest to distance the party from parts of its own record may not be the daftest of ideas.

But Labour’s former big hitters refuse to bow out gracefully and leave Miliband to it.

To add to his other skills, Blair has become a maestro at the passive-aggressive putdown: his latest observation on Miliband’s leadership, was the militantly pro-Ed observation: “I’m not sure he has a problem. That will be for the people to choose.”

And now, just as Labour tries to big up its plans for the NHS and thereby regain the political advantage, along come two of Blair’s former allies, set on giving the impression that the party is still rattling out the internal battles of the 1990s, and handing the newspapers yet another set of anti-Miliband headlines.

First, then, to Alan Milburn, one-time Labour health secretary, who has recently(ish) been heard fretting about the party’s commitment to restoring the 50p rate of tax, and about its relationship with business. 

“You’ve got a pale imitation actually of the 1992 general election campaign,” he told the BBC’s World at One, for whom he was commenting on Miliband’s latest big push on the NHS, yesterday.

“Maybe it will have the same outcome, I don’t know. But it would be a fatal mistake for Labour to go into this election looking as though it is the party that would better resource the NHS but not necessarily put its foot to the floor when it comes to reforming it.”

In fact, Labour is pledged to reform the health service: yesterday’s big Labour event was focused not just on the party’s pledge to create 10,000 new training places for nurses, but also its plans to integrate the care delivered by the NHS with the social care laid on by local authorities.

But perhaps this is not the kind of “reform” Milburn has in mind.

His own time in government gave a rather strong flavour of that: between 1999 and 2003 he began decisively to fragment the NHS via the creation of foundation hospitals; and even before that he had accelerated Labour’s insane experiment with the private finance initiative.

And these days he helps some of the big interests doing well out of the contracting-out of health services – witness his £35,000-a-year gig as chairman of the European advisory board of Bridgepoint Capital: the majority shareholders in Care UK, who are integrally involved in the ongoing outsourcing of NHS services to private companies.

One only need consult the “executive profile” of Milburn on Bloomberg.com to understand that this is only one of the corporate commitments that this former adviser to Pepsico has.

Once the list has got past his work for Bridgepoint, it reads thus:

“Mr. Milburn serves as the Chair of the Global Advisors for Mars Incorporated and is the Chair of PwC’s UK Health Industries Oversight Board. He serves as the Chairman of iWant GreatCare Ltd. Mr. Milburn serves as an Adviser and a Member of the Healthcare Advisory Panel at Lloyds pharmacy Limited … He has been a Member of Strategic Advisory Board at WellDoc, Inc. since September 30, 2013.”

The other former Blair ally who has popped up is John Hutton, a cabinet minister between 2005 and 2009. “I do agree with Alan on all of this,” he said yesterday.

“It is really important Labour doesn’t just have a policy that consists of just committing to spend more on the NHS without tackling some of the fundamental things that need to be fixed … The NHS is going to need very significant reforms in the years ahead if it is going to continue to serve the public interest as best as it can.”

If these “significant reforms” are the kind of which Milburn would approve, Hutton may be able to help: in among his own extensive list of jobs in the private sector – as a consultant to Lockheed Martin, an adviser the Bechtel Corporation, and more – is a non-executive directorship of Circle Holdings plc, the firm that screwed up its supposedly pioneering contract to run Hinchingbrooke hospital, in Cambridgeshire.

Just to heighten the sense that these two old Blairites are on manoeuvres, Hutton and Milburn have also authored an opinion piece for the FT, urging the current Labour leadership to re-embrace the record of the governments in which the pair held office.

Miliband and Ed Balls, they complain, “have worked harder to distance themselves from New Labour than to defend its record”.

What that leaves untouched, of course, is the even more complicated question of New Labour’s legacy, and the spectacle of former ministers urging the breaking-up and selling-off of public services while filling their boots.

A question, then, to Hutton, Milburn, and others like them: if Labour is so awkwardly running from its own past, might that have something to do with it?