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If ever there was a triumph of style over substance, it was the health secretary's speech to the national social services conference in Newcastle last week. John Reid spoke entertainingly, there was even talk of revolution, but the 800-strong audience waited in vain for insights relevant to the conference's dominant theme: the future direction of social care.

The previous speaker, new Association of Directors of Social Services president Tony Hunter, had mentioned a few of the challenges ahead: how social care will function in partnership with health, education and the voluntary sector; how it will retain a distinctive professional role; and how it will engage more successfully with communities and build social capital. These are radical changes, but it was not the social care revolution that Reid wanted to talk about.


Instead there was a throwback to his communist past when he picked up on a whimsical reference Hunter had made to the Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. "Perhaps we should form a revolutionary society," he joked, "but don't tell the other Tony. If anybody asks, just say it was Radio Luxembourg."

It got a laugh, but it also captured something about this speech and so many others like it: the sacrifice of serious politics for the superficial jingle. Apart from polishing up a few one-liners beforehand, Reid had merely managed to think of "sloppy slipper" exchanges as one of social care's significant achievements. And so they are, but where was the evidence of strategic thinking about the evolution of adult-care services that might have supplied the context for this initiative to cut the number of falls among older people?

No such evidence was forthcoming. Social services directors in the audience emerged no better briefed about the impending green paper on adult social care, or about the likely impact of this and the public health white paper on their roles. There was a passing reference to the new post of adult social services director, the next step for many existing directors, but no detail. Education secretary Charles Clarke's comments two days earlier on the new role of children's services director had been equally vacuous.


Warming to his subject, Reid treated us to the famous advice of another revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci, to all change agents everywhere: "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will". And that was how we were sent out into the damp Newcastle air, none the wiser but still vaguely hopeful, going on a wing and a prayer.