s this the beginning of the end? Was that the fatal tipping point in British Prime Minister Tony Blair's career? No, it was just one more step along the bumpy road of decline. Ask his predecessor John Major -- a winged prime minister can be a long time a-dying. There are no men in grey suits gathering outside No. 10 Downing Street. But it didn't need a swarm of commentators to warn him that all would unravel once he announced his departure then endlessly delayed going.
Now his brilliant career is in danger of ending amid both bangs and whimpers. That smooth transition he promised looks unlikely, although it is devoutly wished by his expected successor, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, and by those both eager and less eager to see Blair gone. The longer he lingers, the less his chance of making a good end.
But you can't say he isn't going down fighting, crying against the dying of his light. There he stands, one man alone starting fights in an empty room, beating his head against all four walls at once, opening a new battlefront every week. Downing Street last Thursday said that the prime minister is busy working on a "challenging program." But it is his own challenging behavior that causes his worst problems.
No one else has done this damage to him -- not Brown, not old Labour backbenchers or the opposition.
Worst, his real war looks as grim as ever. The resignation of the work and pensions secretary David Blunkett has driven the daily slaughter in Iraq from the front page, but for thousands of British soldiers there is still no exit strategy in sight from what will always be seen as Blair's own war. Next month, as his tenure of the EU presidency ends with no deal on the fraught budget, the man who vowed to bring the UK closer to Europe has led it further away with his abrasiveness and his war. His EU prescriptions may be partly right, but at home and abroad he never recognizes the futility of being right, all alone on another planet.
Time was when Blair's party muttered that he was spending too long abroad: It was time to come home to domestic issues, they said.
Now they wish he hadn't, as many flinch wherever he turns his attention. What next?
The sending of John Hutton to the Ministry of Work and Pensions is a signal: Hutton is the obedient bag-carrier willing to appear on any program and defend any policy when other ministers are notably absent. He has been sent to enforce the "radical package that dramatically cuts the number of new claimants" on incapacity benefits that Blair demanded of Blunkett in a leaked memo suggesting ?20-a-week cuts.
The No. 10 policy adviser who drafted that letter has been sent in with Hutton to keep the gun to the department's head. The last three ministers, Andrew Smith, Alan Johnson and David Blunkett, all looked at the evidence and chose much more carrot than stick as the solution -- and it's working.
Hutton is Blair's last chance to ignore this inconvenient evidence and take tough action regardless.
If that's what his green paper -- due out soon -- says, it will light the blue touchpaper on the backbenches, as wheelchair protesters arrive with the red paint again outside No. 10.
There is plenty of dynamite already laid on the road ahead. The UK's state-funded National Health Service (NHS) risks meltdown, and members of parliament (MPs) have tumbled to it as trouble erupts in their constituencies.
It is good that the capable hands of Patricia Hewitt are in charge of NHS bomb disposal as she navigates through the mines laid by her predecessors, Alan Milburn and John Reid.
This week she dismantled two of them adeptly over primary (health) care trusts (PCT), which will no longer be obliged to fire 250,000 community nurses and frontline medical staff. PCTs had been instructed to become purely purchasers in the new NHS market.
After a hurricane of protest, she has wisely countermanded the instruction from the now-beleaguered chief executive of the NHS, Sir Nigel Crisp, who ordered the hiving-off of community teams to unspecified and nonexistent market "providers."
Also this week she is defusing the plan to force all PCTs into their third miserable reorganization under Labour: PCTs in London have had a strong indication that they can after all stay coterminous with the boroughs, where at last, after decades of trying, NHS community staff and local social services are pooling budgets, offices and expertise to work together.
Why did anyone think of pulling all PCTs up by their tender roots? It was because of pre-election recklessness by Reid and Blair.
Stung by Tory taunts of growing bureaucracy in the NHS, they threw a wild pledge into the manifesto to cut administration costs by ?250 million (US$437 million), a sum summoned out of thin air. So Reid ordained that the cash must be saved by amalgamating PCTs regardless of what it meant on the ground.
My own Lambeth (London) PCT, for example, relieved that it can stay the same size as the borough, will still have to save ?1 million of its ?5 million admin costs to fund Reid's cuts just when PCTs are told to attract top managers to compete with the kudos of hospitals.
But the truly nuclear explosion comes in a few months when "payment by results" goes live all at once everywhere. The Audit Commission, with all its full authority, has warned loudly of impending danger. Consider this: when the button is pressed every hospital emergency will be paid for, unpredictably, by item of treatment. At present only 25 percent -- the booked surgery -- is paid by results. Now all other hospital activity will be subject to this deliberate destabilization by the market. Mighty edifices risk crashing into heavy debt fast -- though a bout of avian flu might save their balance sheets.
Every NHS expert has always advocated moving money and services out of hospitals' greedy grasp into the community. But only the ideologues driving this want it done in a big bang, with unknowable consequences, so the best may go to the wall and the worst survive. It needs planned closures and amalgamations, setting up better community services first.
But these are coming last in an NHS white paper soon, for implementation some years ahead. Meanwhile, eyes are off the ball in the 28 strategic health authorities to be amalgamated into just 10, because 28 chief executives playing musical chairs for 10 jobs all compete to sound the most gung-ho for the market instead of sounding warning sirens.
To the alarm of wise experts, the entire rationing system that used to keep the NHS more or less on the financial rails has been removed. The brakes are off and our family doctors can refer anyone anywhere with, as yet, no proper system to keep within budget. You can't get more nuclear than that, so pity the bomb-disposal minister.
Meanwhile the terror bill has only begun its rough passage. Explosions over education lie ahead. The education secretary Ruth Kelly has softened the roughest edges, but unless Blair lets her impose a universal fair admissions system, expect serious trouble.
Only lax Liberal Democrats and Tory absentees saved the government vote this week. Labour MPs warn the prime minister to be emollient, to consult and listen, but there's no sign of that. One big test will be Hutton's green paper on welfare reform.
However, there is no rebellion against Blair, nor any Cabinet disloyalty. Not yet. Deep disquiet and impatience is reined in by the disciplined need not to endanger the future. Brown ordains it. Yet that elegant exit for Blair, trailing clouds of glory, looks ever more fanciful as MPs will now vote down what they deplore.
An afterthought for Labour MPs: As they find House of Commons contracted-out cleaners striking for a living wage this week, today's Incomes Data Services (IDS) figures show company directors in the UK's top 350 companies paid themselves an 18.1 percent increase last year, with half earning over ?1 million.
The IDS reports somberly: "Never have so many earned so much."
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