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The BBC's latest political drama The Project hit our screens last week. It revived, once again, a national dialogue about the kind of government we are living under. Is New Labour a militant reforming administration or a corrupt sell out? The Project seems pretty clear; it is the latter.

But there are other New Labour watchers who take an opposing view. Earlier this autumn The Guardian's Polly Toynbee put the case for New Labour as a radical administration. Citing everything from the minimum wage to Sure Start, child tax credits to devolution, Toynbee argued that we are now looking at a modern social democratic government of impressive credentials.


Interestingly, however, this is not quite what Toynbee argues in her excellent book, written with David Walker, on Labour's first term in office, Did Things Get Better?¹ Here, the authors present a much more complex and ambiguous picture of New Labour achievement. Impressive tax and benefit measures to help the working poor have been introduced in the context of a widening gap between rich and poor. Improvements in basic numeracy and literacy that benefit all the nation's children go hand in hand with an ever more subtle stratification, by social class, of public service delivery, fuelled by increasing privatisation of health, education and transport. Put at its crudest, then, New Labour has succeeded in doing no more than tinker with change on the edges of a still unequal society.

And no government project is more baffling than the great crusade to combat social exclusion. No one doubts that the social exclusion unit, based at the heart of government, has been a highly dedicated operation from the outset, producing a stream of papers and plans on everything from truancy to rough sleeping, community regeneration to teenage pregnancy. Nor does anyone doubt the sincerity of Blair and Brown in their mission to reduce, if not wholly eradicate, child poverty.

But what can efforts to combat social exclusion mean in the the context of, in Toynbee and Walkers' words, New Labour's "affectionate warmth" towards big business and its passion for the free market? Not much, one might conclude. If so, do many of the SEU schemes risk becoming little more than caring ways to mitigate or mop up the poors' misery or exercise subtle forms of social control? One of the regular criticisms directed at the SEU has been its ability to meet liberal concerns about social deprivation and a right-wing mania to control and monitor the behaviour of the poor, a nasty habit that even the Tories have now repudiated.

Take the recent identification, referral and tracking initiative. Millions of pounds from the Children's Fund are being poured into the establishment of a data base to identify those at risk of offending, promote greater co-ordination between appropriate professionals, and establish a tracking system to keep an eye on problem children.


The scheme prompts a lot of still unanswered questions. Will wayward middle class teens undergo the same state scrutiny as young people from council estates? Shouldn't we be careful to distinguish between a child with a problem and a problem child? And more generally, are national funds that were originally pledged to promote child welfare now being diverted towards the ever pressing problem of juvenile crime?

These are important questions to which we need answers. But we seem not to get much politics from most politicians these days. It's as if the Prime Minister has arrogated to himself alone the right to side-step the nebulous repetitive language of The Project, and talk about what's really at stake in any given domestic or foreign policy. Bully for him, but he ought to spare a thought for some of his middle ranking and junior ministers who are left to present their departments' latest policy wheeze, often with its ever more complex sources of funding and mish mash of apparently underlying principles, without the brief or backing to talk about their area of expertise in simple political terms. The problem with the Project is not corruption, personal or political. New Labour is stuffed with good people. What New Labour represents is the depoliticisation of politics itself that leaves many of us none the wiser about the true character, meaning or direction of the government we voted in so enthusiastically all those years ago.

¹ Polly Toynbee and David Walker, Did Things Get Better? An Audit of Labour's Successes and Failures, Penguin, 2001

Melissa Benn is a journalist and author.