I listened to a speech made by Gordon Brown in full the other day. Usually, I wouldn’t have bothered, but on this occasion I was at a smallish dinner at which he was giving the keynote speech, so I didn’t have much choice. His theme was ideas. They are, he said, very important. That seemed fair enough. However, the problem with ideas, he went on to say, was that they were hard to translate into reality. The power of ideas was rarely matched with the power to overcome “vested interests”. Think back, he said, to the 1920s, a time when the “right minded” ideas of the likes of Keynes were rejected by the politicians of the day. In the Treasury library there is apparently a copy of Keynes’ We Can Conquer Unemployment, on which an irate official (clearly not a right-minded one) has scrawled “inflation, extravagance, bankruptcy”.
This Mr Brown did not approve of at all: it showed, he said, an unwillingness to work to turn ideas into action. He and his colleagues, on the other hand, intended to “show the power of ideas in action”. This was to involve creating “scientific and educational excellence” and “entrepreneurial flair” across Britain, arranging to “meet and master the challenge of globalisation” and, of course, to break the deadlock and “tackle the wasteful subsidies” holding back Europe.
This was all pretty tough stuff on the action front, I thought. Indeed, it seemed to me it might be wise for Mr Brown to start with having a go at translating a couple of simpler things into reality, say, prudence, for example. Remember his big idea about moving officials out of London to cut costs? So far, under ten from the Treasury have made the move, so there’s still a bit of ideas to action translating to do there. Then there was the idea about cutting 84,150 jobs in the civil service. According to The Times, over the last 15 months the number of full-time civil servants has fallen by only 1,000 and, on a simple headcount (which treats full-time and part-time jobs as the same), there are now more civil servants than when the so-called efficiency drive began.
In fact, there hasn’t been a single redundancy of a full-time employee in the Home Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, or the Department for Education and Skills since mid-2004. So some translating to be done there too. If I were Mr Brown, I’d get on with some of this. The oil price has given his coffers a bit of a break in recent months, but it’s unlikely to be enough to cover his expenses. He’s going to have to cut spending or raise taxes soon. If he doesn’t? “Inflation, extravagance, bankruptcy…”