One would need, as Oscar Wilde would have said, a heart of stone not to laugh at the idea of national newspaper editors, director-generals of the BBC, senior civil servants, captains of industry and other such self-important, mobile-phone carrying personages being forced to queue for several hours at a bleak east London railway station on New Year's Eve. No harm done, most of us would say, if our modern elite suffered, just for an instant, the kinds of frustrations that ordinary people endure every day (and would indeed endure at the Millennium Dome itself as soon as it opened for proper business).
But wait just a minute, and allow the full implications of the fiasco to sink in. What was the point of the event? Why was the Dome built at a cost of £758 million in the first place? The point, in Tony Blair's words, was to establish this nation as "a beacon to the world", to make the British people feel good about themselves, to prove that we could put on a show every bit as memorable as our ancestors achieved in 1851 and 1951. Given all that, does it not suggest quite astonishing incompetence, and culpable inattention to detail, that newspaper editors, of all people, should fail to be delivered to the party on time? It may seem a trivial matter to most of us; but the point surely is that our rulers, from both main parties, chose to invest the occasion with grand, almost mystical significance. It was not trivial to them; yet still they fouled up. And in doing so, they provided an instructive case study of some of new Labour's biggest weaknesses.
There was, for a start, the refusal even to acknowledge that anything had gone wrong. Everything, according to a Downing Street spokesman, had been "a huge success". Thus the government tries to sustain illusion and to ignore reality. It has applied the same technique many times, mistaking the presentational success of a white paper on transport or a new initiative on education or a green paper on welfare reform for what people actually experience on trains, in schools or at job centres.
Then there was the scene on the streets of central London. Again, it is easy to mock aggrieved Guardian letter-writers - now in the same class as the Telegraph's for perpetual disgruntlement - who complained that conditions were not safe for toddlers and asthmatic grannies (as though large crowds at night ever are). But the truth is that the capital, after decades of under-investment, lacks the infrastructure to stage big events. In Paris, for example, on New Year's Eve, only a week after the city had suffered the worst storm of the century, the Metro ran a full and efficient service for free from 5pm throughout the night. London Underground, dependent on the sponsorship of Bacardi, spluttered inadequately into life with the usual array of chaotic delays and station closures.
Next, consider the insistence that everything be done on the cheap - or at least without troubling the Treasury. "No taxpayers' money has been spent on the Dome," said Downing Street with pride. Perhaps if public money had been invested, we would not be saddled with another bland, overcrowded, under-resourced and poorly managed event, described by Polly Toynbee, the Guardian columnist (and previously an enthusiast for the Dome), as something "assembled by exhibition organisers with nothing to exhibit". The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden has suffered a shambolic opening with productions cancelled and performances delayed by hours. Writing in this month's Gramophone, its executive director, Michael Kaiser, boasts that "the country has got a £200 million opera house for £78.5 million - and that's good news". In France and Germany, he adds, "arts organisations get a much larger subsidy and very little private funding". Perhaps that is why their productions are cheaper to see, why they tend to start on time and why they don't get cancelled at the last moment. Perhaps also the habit of "subsidy" (a pejorative word for what many countries regard as perfectly legitimate public financing of major public projects) explains why our Continental neighbours are capable of building sports stadiums on schedule, while London's new Wembley Stadium goes back to the drawing board.
The Dome, then, far from being a trivial matter, emerges as the epitome of a new Labour approach that is all too familiar for comfort. Continue with a Tory project; make a grandiose commitment; employ such words as "new", "modern" and "beacon"; sign up the sponsors; get some slick marketing. And to hell with the content.
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