'Building Britain's Future' - does it mean anything?
The purpose of Gordon Brown's grandiloquent statement on Building Britain's Future is (1) to give the impression that the Government is still fizzing with new ideas (even though the current Parliamentary session is the thinnest for years in terms of legislative reform), (2) to show the Government in a positive light compared with the Tories, and (3) to put the best face on the collapse of the Government's economic model by diverting attention away from its potentially disastrous implications. By those (contradictory) standards, the Government has probably put the best fist on it that they can. But it is still seriously holed below the water-line. There are the obvious weaknesses which have already been highlighted by the Opposition, in particular how will it all be afforded? This is not however a menu without the prices, as Douglas-Home's taunt against Harold Wilson put it in 1964, since the costings of the biggest item - the trebling of the budget for building Council and affordable housing to £2.1bn - are covered by the transfer from the capital spending budgets of DCLG and the Home Office. But there are still funding gaps in other areas, notaly over the proposed health entitlements. Then there is the serious question of enforceability, which is being postponed for several months, which all goes to show that this is a rushed job to fill the political vacuum.
The best part of the programme is the proposal to triple the £600m promised in the last Budget for new Council and housing association homes. The £2.1bn now to be pumped into affordable housing is intended to build an extrqa 20,000 homes on top of the 90,000 already in the pipeline. This is good news since the acute shortage of flats or houses for low-income families to rent is arguably the biggest single cause of social misery in Britain today. But building 55,000 such homes a year for the next 2 years has to be seen against the magnitude of the shortage: there are currently 1.8m households on Council waiting lists, so that at the new slightly improved rate of build it will take 34 years to clear the current list, irrespective of future demand. At least however the New Labour/Tory block on building Council houses for those who will never be able to buy a house has slightly lifted - over the last several years the number of new build by Councils has been down to near zero (just 100 or 200 in many years).
The worst part of the programme is the proposal to dock benefits from any young person out of work for more than a year who refuses to take a job. There are already nearly 1 million people aged 18-24 out of work, no less than 1 in 6 of the age group, the highest rate for 15 years, and still increasing. To meet this need, the Government did announce in the last Budget £1.2bn fund to create employment for up to 100,000 young persons. But that is still only one-tenth of the number requiring jobs. The Government's answer to that is that where no job is available, they will be expected to take training or a community taskforce assignment as a condition of benefit. Sadly, this aspect of Building Britain's Future looks rather punitive, in keeping with Purnell's scheme of so-called welfare reforms, and it would be much better to focus instead on providing significant incentives to employers for taking on young people.
The real problem for Gordon Brown's programme, if it is intended to galvanise Labour activists and voters back into the fold, is that it leaves untouched the foundations of the current economic model which have so deeply alienated such supporters - the ascendancy of the banks and the City of London, an unfettered market system, the excesses of corporate power, the marginalisation of the unions, the growth of obscene levels of inequality - and merely offers a load of sweeties which don't in any way affect the fundamentals. Yet it is only by challenging those fundamentals that Labour supporters will be jerked out of their cynicism and despair. The problem is that this Government is now so weak that it's unable to confront and transform that power structure, even if it was so minded (which it certainly is not).