The word "modernisation" is the politicians' flexible friend. It can be applied to incremental reforms or radical ones. Alternatively, gaping holes in policy can be neatly disguised by the term, as in Labour's promise at the last election to "modernise" the welfare state. An aspiration to be modern suggests fashionable purpose, without conveying any precise meaning at all.
The recent "row" at the top of the government over the public sector has been about "modernisation". As such it has been a very new Labour row. It has been about everything and nothing, the incremental and the revolutionary. What appeared to be happening was different from what was happening. Apparently Tony Blair and John Prescott fell out fleetingly over the pace of "modernisation", although policies were hardly mentioned by either of the evangelising adversaries. In reality both are "modernising" here, standing back from "modernising" there, deploying the full armoury of the centralised state to "modernise" in some areas and citing devolution as an example of "modernisation" in others.
Where differences arise over policy, there is no consistent pattern. Prescott has been more of a moderniser on transport than Blair so far. But on the future of the Post Office Blair's modernising instincts have been hemmed in by the Prescott wing of the party. Blair (with the full backing of Stephen Byers and his predecessor, Peter Mandelson) would privatise the Post Office if it were not for the political uproar that would arise, with Prescott leading the protest. What the two have in common is that both are asking the pivotal question: "How the heck do you improve the public services?"
Prescott poses the question with growing urgency over transport (a portfolio he will retain after the cabinet reshuffle) and Blair asks it across the board. He was not elected to preside over the peculiarly British divide, established in the 1980s, of a relatively prosperous economy and terrible public services.
Indeed, since the fall of Margaret Thatcher, we have had another long- serving Conservative prime minister and the first Labour prime minister for 18 years. We have, it seems, swerved round many a political corner in the long, fractious years that have followed. Yet the two issues that brought about her departure in November 1990 remain unresolved - now, as then. One of them, Europe, has been written about endlessly ever since and will be written about for many years to come, as this government's march towards the single currency will be a long and uncertain one. (I would not put a single pound or euro on a referendum being held shortly after the next election.)
But the other issue that killed off her political career was just as important. For Thatcher asked the same question of the public sector as Blair and Prescott. She came up with some inadequate answers and, in the case of the poll tax, a politically fatal one.
Her successors have not come up with wholly convincing answers, either. If John Major had not invented the Citizens' Charter, new Labour would probably have done so. I can imagine Labour ministers declaiming passionately, "How can anyone say we are like the Tories? We have created the Citizens' Charter."
I make this observation in a not entirely disparaging way. In political terms it was an inspired initiative, a symbolic break with Thatcherite hostility to public services. In a small way it made a practical difference, too. Those responsible for the running of public services became a little more accountable to those who used them. The charter became a joke only when Major himself became a comic character, after the pound was forced out of the ERM. Even so, the charter lacked teeth from the very beginning.
Since Labour came to power it has modernised in a revolutionary way by setting up the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. But in other ways, its so-called innovations can be traced back to the mid-1980s. Indeed the policies of Nicholas Ridley find some surprising echoes in new Labour policies. As environment secretary, Ridley by-passed incompetent local authorities over housing, just as Labour is doing with education. Ridley introduced Housing Action Trusts, accountable to him, rather than the councils, to take over the most run-down housing estates. He also encouraged private landlords to bid for council estates. He described it at the time as a "housing revolution". The only problem was that no new housing was built; his revolution was halted in its tracks.
Partly because of the way councils were marginalised in the 1980s, the calibre of those who work for them is mixed, at best. Until this improves, the government's reluctance to devolve more power is understandable.
This does mean that its approach to the delivery of public services is a hotch-potch and, in some cases, unnecessarily cowardly. The implementation of transport policy has suffered from a gridlock in Whitehall based on the need to find fresh ways of raising money for public transport and a desire not to make the motorist pay for it - at least until the next election is out of the way.
Did I mention "money" in that previous sentence? Thatcher's most enduring legacy has been to create a consensus that services can be improved without much more money being spent on them. Blair and Gordon Brown are right to insist that the public sector become more efficient, less bureaucratic and more flexible. But I suspect they will find that real "modernisation" will cost a lot more money. They will be reluctant to spend it. It is no coincidence that the measure Blair announced to underline his government's modernising instincts, the ban on fox-hunting, will not cost a single penny.
