The Conservatives managed for 18 years to blame most of the country's failings on the left: loony left councils, over-mighty unions, feather-bedded nationalised industries, sixties trendiness and so on. No such easy excuses will be available to this government for three reasons. First, Labour dominates the local council chambers as much as it dominates Westminster and, barring unexpected poll disasters, will continue to do so. Second, this government has not made the sharp break with the past that Margaret Thatcher did; attempts to blame failing rail services on privatisation, for example, risk sounding ridiculous when Labour proposes solutions for the London Tube that look suspiciously similar. Third, Labour has promised measurable improvements in public services: shorter hospital waiting lists, higher standards of literacy and numeracy among 11 year olds, fewer car thefts, more Internet connections in libraries, and hosts of others, all laid out as "targets" in a 176-page paper published recently.
The problem is that nothing improves overnight and that, in any case, voters will ultimately judge the government not on the statistics of targets met, but on their first-hand experience. Waiting lists, still marginally longer than when the Tories left office, may be shortened at the expense of acute services. Smaller infant school classes - a target even further from achievement - will be experienced by only a tiny minority of parents who may find that, when their child reaches later stages, the classes are actually larger. As for public transport - the condition of which must surely have swung many London and south-east commuters to Labour at the last election - tangible results will take decades, rather than years.
The culture of Westminster, Millbank and the London media, however, does not tolerate the long-term view. A minister may reasonably say that, after two or three big initiatives, he will devote himself to ensuring their successful implementation. But this will be portrayed as inactivity; the voracious appetite of television and newspapers, combined with the egos of politicians, demands a stream of initiatives, relaunches, announcements, white papers, green papers. Ministers must be seen to be busy, to the point of exhaustion, even when there is no cause for them to be so. They must take their cue from the 16th-century poet John Skelton: "I blunder, I bluster, I blow, and I blother/I make on the one day and I mar on the other/Busy, busy, and ever busy,/ I dance up and down until I am dizzy."
It is doubtful that the public is greatly impressed. It will find morale as low and service as surly as it has been in the public sector for years. And here ministers can make a short-term difference, though they show few signs of understanding how. Drowned by official paperwork - most of it generated by demands for evidence of progress towards targets - the public sector has no time for patients, parents or children. The effects of poor morale show in growing recruitment problems: the country is 8,000 nurses and 10,000 teachers short. Polls show that large proportions of those now working in schools and hospitals would get out if they could. Wages, though important, are only part of the problem. Teachers, nurses, social workers and other public sector professionals feel devalued by years of political denigration.
Take Tony Blair's comments on radio this week: "When I look at some of the inner-city schooling, no wonder parents feel that they have to move out . . . It's just not acceptable." Many parents would agree with that. But think how it sounds to inner-city teachers, like the London head who risked his life to halt a stabbing outside his school last week. Day in, day out, for moderate pay, they face aggression from parents as well as children. They cope with pupils so disturbed and deprived that they sometimes seem at least half-mad. They struggle to teach children whose capacity to learn is stunted by poor food, too many videos, family turbulence and a dozen other side-effects of poverty, and they hear ministers prattling on about low expectations.
To them, Mr Blair's comments - which will be heard by some of their parents and pupils - are simply a betrayal. Call people rubbish and they will believe they are rubbish, and behave accordingly. The Prime Minister and his colleagues think, probably rightly, that they are using the language Middle England wants to hear. But the public sector needs leadership, not just criticism. If ministers want to make a real difference, they should put aside, for a time, their targets, initiatives and strategies, and consider how to create a better spirit among those who actually serve the public.
