inept new leader, Tony Blair's Labour team could have done anything they wanted.
The harsh fact is that they wanted to continue with Tory economics, Tory cash limits, Tory anti-union laws, Tory foreign policy, Tory tactics on law and order, and Tory attacks on the welfare state - all of them dressed up in the hypocritical and pointless gobbledygook of "modernisation".
They wanted to bring unelected millionaire union-busters like BP's Lord Simon into the government, even as they push through plans to keep the unions even further from any real control or influence on the party they have financed with affiliation fees.
The only promises and policies to have been cast aside since May 1 are those which hinted at any radical attempt to undermine the Thatcher/Major legacy of privatisation, free market economics and skid row public services.
Of course there have been a few scraps of reforms thrown to the union bureaucrats to gag any potential opposilion. But these concessions have merely shown how much more could have been done so easily by Labour.
The long-standing battle for union rights at GCHQ was ended at a stroke by the intervention of Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. But there is no sign of intervention on the Liverpool dockers' fight or other long-running disputes, despite the influence ministers could have.
There are vague promises of a White Paper on union recognition, but Employment Minister Andrew Smith has failed even to write a letCH ter of support to journalists in his constituency fighting derecognition at the Oxford Mail. Those who argue workers haven't got a prayer of extending union rights under Tony Blair were offered little consolation at the TUC by the appearance of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The government made a big deal out of signing the European Social Chapter, but its puny provisions will take years to affect British workers. Promised action on a minimum wage has been shelved while a London Business School academic chairs a review.
There are so many examples of retreats on key policy commitALAR GCHQ workers saw swift government action: no such luck for the Liverpool dockers after 2 years of struggle ments it is hard to sum them up. New Labour in government appears to have no memory of its stance in opposition.
Perhaps one of the most craven episodes was when Transport Minister Glenda Jackson, confronted by an independent report showing post-privatisation rail services in Britain to be far and away the most expensive in the world, attempted to denigrate the report and defend the Tory system of "regulation" which is pumping millions in state subsidies straight into the profits of train operators. Six months earlier, as a shadow minister she would have been arguing the opposite point of view.
Another swift about-face came from Glenda's boss, Environment and Transport Secretary John Prescott. He ignored all-party representations and glibly discarded Labour's pledge to end the universal "capping" of council tax, when he opted to impose additional cuts of over £6 million on council services Oxfordshire, one of only three counties to appeal for the right to raise more in tax.
Robin Cook came forward with a high-falutin pronouncement on a new, moral foreign policy, only to turn tail and endorse continued arms shipments to the brutal Indonesian regime. Labour's complicity with the continued massive arms trade is leading the new government to echo the grisly record of previous Labour governments:
many will recall David Owen standing firm as almost the last international supporter of the Shah of Iran. But when it comes to dropping recent policy commitments and promises, it is hard for any department to beat Health Secretary Frank Dobson and his lily-livered bunch of ministers. Within days of his appointment, junior minister Alan Milburn had ditched Labour's pledge to save Edgware Hospital's Accident & Emergency unit. Shortly afterwards he and Dobson effectively rubber-stamped the rundown and closure of acute services at Guy's The only promises and policies to have been cast aside since May 1 are those which hinted at any radical attempt to undermine the Thatcher/Major legacy of privatisation, free market economics and skid row public services.
Hospital. But these policies were just a taster of the retreats and reverses to come Since then: • Dobson has summarily ditched the detailed (if confused) policy spelled out last December by Labour's Health spokesperson Chris Smith to replace the Tory "internal market" system, and specifically to replace the controversial system of GP Fundholders. Now Dobson argues there are "good points" about fundholding. • It is clear that the bureaucratic nonsense of the "purchaser provider split" is here to stay, but NHS managers have been baffled by the latest government guidance (which says that contracts should be negotiated for three years instead of annually, but then admits that prices will have to be renegotiated every 12 months!). Few health bosses now expect real changes in the promised White Paper. As one summed it up "The internal market is still there ... but it is in sheep's clothing."
• Without scrapping the NHS market system, Labour's pledge to save £100m from bureaucracy and invest this in cutting waiting lists is an empty phrase. And without purting any additional money into health authority budgets this year, • Gordon Brown's budget announcement of an "extra" £1.2 billion for the NHS from April is also largely meaningless: latest estimates are that health authorities and Trusts will have piled up deficits of at least £700 million by then, heralding even bigger cuts to come.
• Also gone without trace is Labour's promise of a Royal Commission on care of the frail elderly, a service which has been effectively privatised by the Tories, with increasingly disastrous consequences.
• Dobson in June pledged to scrap the hated system of local pay bargaining which divides the 1million-strong NHS workforce -but promptly toned down and apparently withdrew the commitment only weeks later.
Labour ministers have backed a 52-page Department of Health document claiming that nurses' pay has risen 164% since 1984, and that therefore yet another year of below inflation pay awards would "not imply a real pay cut". Labour ministers in August triumphantly published figures to show the horrendous increase in hospital waiting lists created by years of Tory underfunding - while they know that Gordon Brown has ruled out spending the extra money needed to tackle the problem, and health ministers freely admit that queues for treatment are likely to grow much longer in the months to come.
• As this article is written, the blood testing and processing centre in Liverpool is closing despite a giant campaign to save it and an independent report to Dobson stating that the rationale behind the National Blood Authority's decision
Socialist Dullook to move the service to Manchester "remains unproven".
Amid this catalogue of timid failures and retreats, health ministers have also been at the forefront of a right wing counter-offensive, promoting the idea of the Private Finance Initiative, allowing profitseeking companies to build and manage hospitals for the NHS. LAIBOOL TY
UNI OUR FREEDOM