Alan Milburn, the Chamaeleon

by ecologics

Despite everything that’s happened, I don’t think many people grasp just how raw, how explicit, the corruption of our institutions has become — Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times

You have to hand it to New Labour. Its spin doctors are still the best in the business. They have not only acquired all of the skills of their Conservative tutors, but have developed spinning into such a high art that it is now necessary to distinguish between New Labour’s plain spins, e.g. the reasons given for going to war in Iraq, and what might be described as the party’s ‘meta-spins’. Meta-spins are spins on the back of spins; to paraphrase the old joke about turtles and the universe, with New Labour spin doctors it’s spins all the way down.

Yesterday and today we have been treated to a good example of the second type of New Labour spinning. The EcoLogics spin detector went off at approximately one minute past midnight on Saturday, when the Guardian’s website published an article by Alan Milburn rather lengthily titled ‘The UK is an unequal society in which class background too often determines life chances’ (the article appeared in the Observer as well).

To a naïve reader (if there is such a thing these days), Alan Milburn was representing the depressing facts of the UK’s class divide:  he suggested that ‘in the decades since the second world war’, social mobility ‘has slowed’, and that it is now necessary to do more to improve people’s ‘life chances’. Enter, stage allegedly left, the man who was once the former trade unionist-cum-working class leader-in-waiting, proclaiming the legacy of the Labour Party:  ‘The postwar Labour government’s towering achievements – full employment, universal education and a new welfare state – helped millions of people, me included, to realise the new opportunities brought by social and economic change’.

To a critical reader, or a reader not suffering from news amnesia, it’s difficult to decide what is more astonishing: what I have to interpret as Milburn’s efforts to pass the buck for the disastrous consequences of New Labour’s policies to a hazy process that has supposedly taken place ‘over the decades’ (which is not untrue in and of itself, but it does get New Labour off the hook for its own role in the process); or what we may describe, by way of a satirical image, as Milburn’s truly chamaeleonic ability to change political colours at will. In the aforementioned article, he is so beguilingly full of praise for state intervention that one is almost persuaded that one of New Labour’s leading politicians has finally exorcised the hydra of neoliberalism from his body.

But is this the ‘real’ Milburn? In an article recently published in the Guardian, Seumas Milne named names in the revolving public-private door that is a New Labour cabinet post. The relevant bit is worth quoting in some length:

…former health ministers have done particularly well. The ex-health secretary Patricia Hewitt earns more than £100,000 as a consultant for Alliance Boots and Cinven, a private equity group that bought 25 private hospitals from Bupa. After leaving the department, her predecessor, Alan Milburn, worked for Bridgepoint Capital, which successfully bid for NHS contracts, and now boasts a striking portfolio of jobs with private health companies. When I rang Milburn yesterday to ask whether he saw any conflict of interest in his directorships, he swore and hung up, but later emailed to say he had “always followed the proper processes laid down for former ministers”.

Other articles in the press have noted that Milburn has five paid roles in addition to his parliamentary work, including posts with PepsiCo and Lloyds Pharmacy. The ‘They Vote For You’ website—what an ironic title that has become—suggests that Milburn has certainly been loyal to any masters in the private healthcare business: he is listed as having voted ‘very strongly’ in favour of Foundation Hospitals, the same hospitals that Unison, the leading trade union for the sector, has described as leading ‘to increased inequalities between NHS services and the extension of charging’. Aside from what many would regard as the betrayal of the trade union, EcoLogics wonders how Milburn would square his role vis-a-vis the NHS with the statement quoted earlier: ‘The postwar Labour government’s towering achievements – full employment, universal education and a new welfare state – helped millions of people, me included…’ Alas, when one rereads the statement, one realises that a major ‘old’ Labour achievement that Milburn hasn’t singled for praise is the NHS.

EcoLogics can imagine Milburn jumping up to argue that he includes the NHS within the welfare state; but a similar omission occurs in a piece that Milburn wrote in May for the Independent. On the eve of the leadership jousting that preceded New Labour’s electoral disaster in early June, Milburn apparently felt compelled to beat his chest vigorously, writing as he did that New Labour had better not betray Blairism. In one passage that shows perhaps most clearly than most Milburn’s enthusiasm for neoliberalism, Milburn almost snarled that ‘those licking their lips at the prospect of an end to market capitalism…risk gorging prematurely on a beast that has life still in it.’ ‘Government intervention to stabilise and stimulate the global economy must not become the foundation for a wider creeping programme of nationalisation in which the state assumes responsibilities that properly belong either to markets or to citizens.’

The careful omission of the NHS occurred in a passage in which Milburn nonetheless changed his colours from the deepest blue to a very pale pink:  ‘…when it comes to social change it is inconceivable that disadvantage can be overcome without the state or politics playing its part. Poor people are hardly able to spend their way out of poverty. If Britain is to become truly socially mobile they need help with education, housing, training, childcare and employment.’ Either Milburn doesn’t believe that being healthy is an integral part of one’s ‘life chances’, or our chamaeleonic politician decided not to change his colours completely; I wonder if he felt it would be wise not to upset Bridgepoint Capital et al. The news in the wake of the MP’s expenses scandal that Milburn is set to stand down at the next election (will he really go?) generates further questions.

Now Seumas Milne noted that it was perfectly true that Milburn had indeed ‘followed the proper processes laid down for former ministers’. EcoLogics believes that there is now actual corruption on an unprecedented scale in the very highest levels of New Labour (how paradoxical that New Labour has decided to reinstate direct rule in the Turks and Caicos Islands, on the grounds of corruption). That said, the practices analysed here may be interpreted as belonging to the category of Seumas Milne’s ‘culture of corruption’, or what I myself have described as ‘virtual’ corruption: practices which are perfectly legal, or have been made perfectly legal, or which form part of that fuzzy logic commonly described as ‘not illegal’, but which might once have led to the resignation of a politician in a flaming political scandal.

The genius of New Labour’s spinning machine, and of Milburn’s changing hues, is that both have arguably served to conceal until recently the sheer extent to which the party’s politics may be driven by this kind of fuzzy logic. While the culture of corruption (in Seumas Milne’s memorable phrase) here in Britain arguably bears comparison with that of Saramago’s ‘Berlusconi Thing’, this is still not evident to many, perhaps even most people in the UK. We might say, in this sense, that the epigraph by Krugman applies as much to the U.S. as it does the U.K.: people do not appear to have realised the extent of the ‘culture of corruption’.

In this blogger’s view, the culture of corruption may have gone so far that just about anything that a New Labour politician may say about the welfare state may well be no more than a half truth, even if only by dint of certain omission or an unacknowledged contradiction. So it is that we have Alan Milburn saying very earnestly one moment how much he venerates the welfare state, even as at another moment he swears at a journalist who asks about Milburn’s links to private companies that are arguably intent on taking over the ‘business’ of the NHS.