Society
The New Statesman Profile - IPPR
Published 21 August 2000
What real influence does the voice of the centre left and Labour's favourite think-tank wield? The Institute for Public Policy Research profiled byNick Cohen
Last year, Matthew Taylor, a former assistant general secretary of the Labour Party, wrote of his part in compiling the famous pledge card that the electorate was offered in 1997. "As a marketing device", the promises not to raise income tax and to reduce juvenile crime, hospital waiting-lists, youth unemployment and class sizes were "brilliant" and had been "copied across the world". They were also, as Taylor admitted, worthless or worse. The commitment to cut waiting-lists by 100,000 was "a largely irrelevant measure" that was distorting the care of the sick. The pledge to lower class sizes of five- to seven-year-olds to 30 wasn't "sensible" when it meant that eight-year-olds were spatchcocked into classes of 40 as a consequence.
The reader could reasonably expect an apology to follow, or, at least, an unblinkered reflection on the dangers of "marketing" false or foolish promises when Gordon Brown was preparing a spending settlement that would make a Tory chancellor wince. No contrition was offered. The pledges remained inspired, Taylor insisted, not because they had been redeemed or had improved public life but because "they helped Labour win and for that reason they will always be a success". Always a success? The combination of naivety, swagger and cynicism - qualities that as often complement as oppose each other - would be unremarkable if Taylor had left Millbank to seek a bubble reputation in the lobbying racket, like so many of his colleagues. Instead, he was appointed director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, supposedly the most rigorous of the metropolitan thought factories.
He has brought it publicity. Scarcely a day passes without him appearing on the news-chat shows to be introduced by lazy hosts as a spokesman for the "independent, left-of-centre think-tank". Ministers use IPPR forums to tell us of initiatives to harry the unemployed. At the Labour Party conference, Cherie Booth, no less, will face a fascinated and predatory media when she favours one of the institute's debates by chairing it.
Such blessing by the Establishment brings with it the standard charge against the IPPR that it is the home for new Labour intellectuals who trim their ideas to suit the fashions of their masters. The allegation isn't new - from its foundation in 1988, the institute has been accused of being too close to the party's leadership - and is beside the point. There is nothing reprehensible about policy specialists manoeuvring to ensure their ideas are made flesh and, inevitably, compromising in the process. Who, after all, do you admire more: the thinker who produces permanent reforms, or the permanent oppositionalist who goes to his grave a whining virgin? The real interest and slight sadness lies in the nature of the equivocations that Tony Blair has demanded.
The IPPR was the creation of Neil Kinnock. Trade unions and "progressive" businessmen such as Clive Hollick provided £1m so that its fellows might study how the then modish phrase "market socialism" could be put into practice. Unlike its giddy rival, Demos, the institute was proud to produce respectable and dull documents. It never replicated the inanity of Demos's suggestions to bring back the stocks, hold a PE festival each July (in Manchester) or rebrand these islands as Cool Britannia, the funkiest archipelago to jive in the surf of the North Atlantic. Tension between the two exists to this day. While Demos succumbs to incurable techno-utopianism and gurgles about the future being dominated by portfolio workers skipping from one e-business to the next, the IPPR is ready to argue that the weightless world is a high-bourgeois fantasy and the typical modern employee a care worker in Accrington, rather than Martha Lane Fox. For this, Taylor and his colleagues deserve thanks.
Nor was the institute packed with cowards. Every paragraph of its Commission on Social Justice report may have been approved by the Labour leadership (whatever happened to social justice, by the way?), but it allowed itself the freedom to compose a model written constitution that ran far ahead of Kinnock's and John Smith's thinking. James Cornford, the first director, said his colleagues may have looked like conformists, but they were willing to go "a long way beyond what was acceptable".
Cornford was succeeded by Gerry Holtham, who reputedly took a £250,000 pay cut to move from the City to the institute's offices in Covent Garden. The IPPR became even more business-friendly. One complacent report claimed that the NHS did not need greater resources. Yet serious people continued to complete serious work on the economy and civil liberties.
The 1997 election saw IPPR graduates - Patricia Hewitt and Baroness (Tessa) Blackstone - trip into government and a crisis develop among the thinkers of the "radical" centre. Its members found themselves in an intellectual prison. Anthony Barnett, the former director of Charter 88, whose high hopes of the Prime Minister quickly soured, says the policing of debate was Blair's catastrophic mistake: "Margaret Thatcher allowed her intellectuals to charge off, which meant there was genuine excitement in her time, whether you liked it or not. With Blair, there is nothing but stultification. No one capable of doing original work is in love with the regime. Only the regime is in love with the regime."
When Holtham returned to the City in 1998, Blair and Peter Mandelson were determined that a protege of theirs should get the job. Taylor was their man. He was always going to be a difficult candidate to impose. The son of Laurie is almost a caricature Third Wayer: thirtysomething, gym trim, smart-but-casual, networking and networked against. Westminster is a poisonous little world, and it is hard to judge how seriously to take much of the malice directed at a man I have always found amiable. All I know is that new Labourites who, in normal circumstances, would not dream of talking to me have stampeded to grasp the knife and thrust it in. "I like most people in politics, but could never stomach him," said one. "Cruel, arrogant and untrustworthy," said another.
Taylor was an ally of Sally Morgan, Blair's political secretary, and thus an enemy of her enemy - Margaret McDonagh, the party's general secretary. Their spats were about places at court - who would be the favoured keeper of the king's stools - and, naturally, didn't involve anything as perverse as matters of principle. But the result of the bitching was that Taylor ended up in the Mandelson camp. Mandelson's lobbying of the institute's trustees on Taylor's behalf was so ferocious that even Hollick, a new Labour loyalist, protested that the IPPR's independence was being undermined. The trustees split, the Hollick faction lost and Taylor was installed.
What was he to do next? What can the director of a "centre-left" think-tank come up with to attract the attention of a right-of- centre "Labour" prime minister? Constitutional reform was out of the question. Blair was no longer interested in democratising Britain, and Taylor had shown a tin ear for devolution when he decreed that Labour members of the Scottish Parliament must do as London instructed. The IPPR did champion a radical proposal to give all 18-year-olds a dowry to help them start their careers. But that was not the big idea. No, the grand, new programme for the new century was Thatcherism.
The IPPR has established a commission to investigate the private finance initiative - a remarkable act of extortion on the taxpayer. In brief, it allows the government to mortgage the future at enormous cost by paying private consortia to build and administer public works in annual instalments over 30 or 60 years. The price of a typical hospital rises from £180m to £900m at current prices when the government spreads the burden on to our children and grandchildren. To meet the repayments, health authorities are already opening hospitals with fewer beds than their predecessors, devastating community care and provoking mass demonstrations in such hotbeds of insurrection as the Worcestershire red belt. The best academic accountants have torn into the Treasury's justification that the stunning bills are compensation for corporations bearing the risk of cost overruns. The new Labour-dominated Commons Treasury Committee has dismissed the programme as pointless. The British Medical Journal described it as "perfidious financial idiocy".
The IPPR might have been expected to agree. Peter Robinson, the institute's chief economist, had said there was no fiscal need for the Treasury to soak the next generation. The first, tiny hint that the PFI commission would come to the aid of the government came when the names of the sponsors were released. They were KPMG and Nomura, which takes commissions for stitching up deals; Serco, which runs private prisons; and the Norwich Union, which wants to take over doctors' surgeries.
The backers should be pleased with the service. The last time I saw Taylor, he bellowed: "What have you got against private prisons?" "The same thing I've got against slavery," I might have replied. "It's immoral to profit from human captivity." Or "the prisons with the worst suicide records are private prisons and Serco's jails are particularly repellent". There was no point in arguing. Taylor spoke with the truculence of a man who had convinced himself that he was bravely thinking the unthinkable as he repeated the dogmas of the 1980s. Then, so does the Prime Minister.
"The problem we've got," confessed one commission member, "is that the intellectually cogent evidence we're hearing is against PFI, but the government and the sponsors aren't going to like it." They probably aren't going to hear it. Gavin Kelly, the secretary to the PFI commission, has already said he wants more privatisation.
Where intellectual honesty and independence lie in all of this is for others to determine, but we can dispense with the notion that the IPPR has anything to do with the "left of centre", doltish assertions by the BBC notwithstanding, and send it back to its cell with relief. You would blame it less for being imprisoned by the conservative consensus if it did not pander to the guards so shamelessly.
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