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Writer, leader, romantic idealist

Still from Jill Craigie's 1945 film, The Way We Live

I wasn’t always an admirer of Michael Foot. In the heady 1981 summer of Warrington's by-election I was sixteen and, intoxicated by the SDP and Roy Jenkins, thought Foot the worn-out leader of a hollowed-out Labour tribe. His ideas were irrelevant to modern times, his party kept alive only by old-fashioned dogma and ritual. I still think his policies were wrong, then. I now realise though that Labour’s wasted years were not his fault, at least not primarily; I realise what a great writer and idealist he was; and I realise how much not just Labour but all our liberal and left politics owes to him.

… the Western world is gripped by the most perilous complex and perilous recession which we have seen since 1945. It is indeed, in my judgement, a crisis of Capitalism of a most formidable character, and we have to muster all our energies, all our skill, to deal with it. Let me start therefore by telling you what is my deepest instinct about the whole of this situation; it is of first importance for our country, and no less for our Labour movement, that this crisis should be faced and surmounted by a Labour government acting in the close alliance and good faith with the trade-union movement of this country. If we were to fall apart, I shudder to think what would be the consequences for our people, for our young people and old alike, in unemployment and in all the other associated consequences.

 

Speech to the Labour Party conference, 1976

It’s sometimes said Foot should have been a writer, never an active politician. I disagree: what’s most attractive and admirable about him is that he combined writing with political engagement, with real achievement in each field. But I do want to start with Foot the writer, because it’s the side of him less often commented on. He was a brilliant essayist with a flair for polemic evident in his wartime success Guilty Men. His short studies of his Labour and Tory colleagues and opponents – for instance in 1984’s Loyalists and Loners – are witty, instructive, often generous (including for instance about Enoch Powell) and sometimes devastating, in the case of George Brown, for instance. Only in the case of his bitter piece on David Owen do I (perhaps unsurprisingly) sense unfairness, his implied comparison with Oswald Mosley surely an outrageous one whatever the depth of their disagreement or his distaste for Owen's personality and choices. His great work though is his two-volume biography of Aneurin Bevan, the man he thought the greatest socialist but whose ideas have been strangely forgotten, beyond the fact of his "founding" the NHS. Bevan deserves to be remembered, and we have the great Bevanite Michael Foot to thank for this sympathetic record of his hero’s life and ideas. Having completed his life of Bevan, the great principled divider in a sense too big for party, Foot embarked upon an admirable career as an ultra-loyalist minister in the 1970s under Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. As employment secretary in 1974 his passage of the Health and Safety at Work Act is an achievement that would, on its own, justify the career of any Labour politician: many lives have been saved by it. Later, as Leader of the House it was in great part his commitment and his work negotiating with the Liberals that kept Labour’s show on the road. His own defence of the record in government is worth reading.

... we carried through, sometimes by only one or two votes, a series of Socialist measures, manifesto commitments, more ambitious and consistent than anything the previous Labour Government (with its majority of 100 and Tony Benn in the Cabinet) had attempted. Moreover, the programme executed with such determination covered a whole range of policies - industrial relations, public ownership, the rescue of many industries large and small, the extension of social services and the fulfilment of long-standing promises on such items as child benefit, comprehensive education, the abolition of the tied cottage. Almost for the first time, a real concerted advance was made in extending women's rights: apart from the child benefit paid to the mother, new maternity rights were introduced, a Sex Discrimination Act was placed on the Statute Book, and the Equal Pay Act was brought into operation, despite all the other obstacles on the arena of pay policy.

 

Brother Tony, from Loyalists and Loners

Foot’s tragedy as Labour leader was that the now venerable loyalist and uniter had to contend with ferocious internal opposition from a new kind of Bevanist controversy, but this time caused by a more acute, dogmatic, ambitious and virulent strain of leftism: Bennery. It’s been funny to see Tony Benn wheeled out on television to pay tribute to Michael Foot, as though they were the finest old chums and comrades, back in the day. In truth Benn, having welcomed Foot’s leadership, tried to both use and destroy it, and to capture Labour for his own ends. The two men were fierce enemies in Labour’s most bitter battle.

1981 could and should have been the year in which the Labour movement applied all its energies to concert united vengeance for the wounds inflicted upon our people and to destroy the Tory Government. Instead, we turned it into a period of futility and shame, and the responsibility for transmuting every controversy of the time into an internal Labour Party dispute rested directly with Tony Benn.

 

Brother Tony, from Loyalists and Loners

To his credit, he faced down Benn and he took on Militant, a hard decision for a leader who’d condemned the witch-hunts of the Labour right against Bevan and his supporters in the fifties. Militant was not like the Bevanites, though, and though history has credited Neil Kinnock and his great 1985 speech with their defeat, it was Foot who started the fight-back. He failed to keep Labour together of course, but I doubt he could have done anything to prevent the split. Perhaps had Denis Healey been leader, he might have fought line-by-line for sensible social democratic policies and attacked Benn with an aggression just capable of inspiring other old Gaitskillites to stay and beat him. But in their very choice of Foot, Labour MPs had shrunk from, and Bennite MPs had cannily prevented, that strategy. Foot might well fight, fight and fight again, but not for the things the future SDP wanted. Foot actually believed in the key policies that (alongside the important internal rule changes like mandatory reselection and the electoral college, which were thoroughly Bennite victories) convinced the future SDP that Labour was no longer home. Given his own beliefs, he did all he could. I thought then, and think now, that Foot was wrong on all the big issues in the 1980s. On defence, he was a willing prisoner of the past, as a long-time opponent of nuclear weapons, unilateral disarmer and founder of CND. Looking again at Aneurin Bevan I can see that he and Bevan had a good case in the 1950s against Britain’s testing and making the bomb – perhaps I would have been with them, then. But the 1980s was the wrong time to adopt unilateral nuclear disarmament as this country’s strategic choice, and remove US bases. In response to Moscow’s suppression of Czechoslovakia and Poland and its deployment of SS-20s in eastern Europe, we needed to hold firm to our alliances, as Bevan had realised in 1957, not cast them aside. Here is Foot on Bevan's rejection of outright unilateralism:

So why did he do it? Why had he risked so much and for what gain?... Was it true that Sam Watson in particular had taken him to a high mountain and shown him all the kingdoms of the earth, the offices and influence in the Labour Party which would be his...? … Of course it was true that Party considerations influenced his conduct, and why not? During that Friday and Saturday he saw more clearly than ever before the divisions that might occur if he refused to speak, if a new split developed. He saw the chasm opening at his feet, he saw the renewal of the old battles as the months went by, he saw the destruction of any hope for a new Labour government, he saw the accusations of his opponents – and perhaps of history – that he could have forestalled the catastrophe but that he had preferred the ease of his own conscience and the comfort of his friends. He saw the long trek back for the Bevanites and himself into the wilderness and the endless sojourn there, and he never had the taste, despite all the taunts, for martyrdom, for locusts and wild honey.

Aneurin Bevan

The INF treaty of 1987 vindicated NATO’s strategy: unilateral desertion of it by Britain would at best have given the USSR a little more time, at worst have undermined the strategy badly. On Europe, to withdraw immediately, less than a decade after our joining, after the voters had decided overwhelmingly to stay in and without consulting them further, would have been a foreign policy disaster. Only this weekend, a Dutch social democrat who remembers those days told me how disappointed she was by Margaret Thatcher's European policy. How much worse would Michael Foot's have been? Perhaps I should have said Foot was wrong on almost all the big issues - because he was undoubtedly and admirably right over the Falklands. Tony Benn opposed the retaking of the islands: his diaries show he wanted immediate UN negotiations on sovereignty, reflecting the (to be fair) pretty consistent "stop the war" position he has taken ever since on conflicts such as Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the war on Milosevic over Kosovo. Foot rightly saw the Falklands crisis in terms of the need to oppose, with force if need be, the unwarranted aggression of a brutal military dictatorship. He favoured action through the UN, of course, and required adherence to the Charter. Rightly so. But his preparedness to support the lawful use of force as the last resort shows his practical commitment to the ideals of that Charter. He wanted international structures to be an effective way of preventing and resisting aggression, not a procedural mask for inaction and appeasement, a stance that makes his opposition to the Iraq war all the more credible and persuasive. I remain a supporter of that conflict, but Foot’s opposition to it gave me infinitely greater pause than, say, George Galloway’s. So I think Michael Foot’s principles deserve re-evaluation, and that he has important things to teach the left. He wanted international control of nuclear weapons, and their ultimate abolition. The right aims, and although they can only be distant ones it is right to support Barack Obama now in his efforts to move us just a few short steps along the way. My concern is that perhaps the international community should be investing in missile defence, not abandoning it. And I wonder what it means we should do about Iran. Importantly, though, we're no longer in the 1980s, and it's less clear what an independent British deterrent is for. Perhaps we should think hard once more about whether it makes sense to stand by the decision Britain took in the different circumstances of the 1950s. On Europe, all but a few on the Labour side have now abandoned Foot’s thinking, and I would certainly not argue for a Euroscepticism effectively indistinguishable from that of Bill Cash. Even here, though, Foot can teach us something. First, that Euroscepticism is not an intrinsically Conservative attitude and that liberal internationalism does not require support for all the works of Brussels. Secondly, that talk of reclaiming national sovereignty by Act of Parliament is twisted-tongued nonsense. He’d surely have snorted derisively at David Cameron’s Canute-like pretensions. Finally: a lifelong radical, Michael Foot was very much a conservative when it came to the constitution, believing in Westminster and in our electoral system as superior to proportional systems and coalition politics. That’s an attitude well out of fashion on the left, but it’s neither right-wing nor obsolete. I’d like to see it revived.

He became one of the chief glories of our nation and people, and I defy anyone who loves the English language and the English heritage to think of him without a glow of patriotism … the critic of all principalities and powers, the incorrigible dissenter, the foremost sceptic and exponent of free thought throughout the last half-dozen decades was English to the core, as uniquely English as the free-thinking Whiggery in which he was reared and against whose complacencies and limitations he revolted.

 

On Bertrand Russell, Philosopher-Englishman, from Debts of Honour

Michael Foot was a romantic idealist whose admirable commitment to causes – the anti-nuclear cause and the cause of this country’s independent democratic model – won him Labour’s leadership when those causes suited others’ aims. But those same commitments led to wrong policy choices in the 1980s which disbarred him from forming a government. His real achievements as a minister deserve respect, his speaking talent admiration, and his ability and achievement as a writer amply deserve both: he leaves a rich legacy of socialist thought and history and has immortalised the political career of his greatest hero. His valiant, doomed attempt to keep the Labour family together and his resistance to Benn and the far left mean he deserves some of the credit for New Labour, too. This certainly amounts to greatness of a kind, and greatness in the service of excellent humanitarian aims: peace, justice, knowledge, a better world. Those who knew him also speak uniformly of his kindness, warmth and generosity – that can be no accident. For once, then, there is no trace of irony when we say Michael Foot was both a great and a good man.

This piece first appeared at The Wardman Wire

The Citizen Ethics Network

Steve Punter | CreativeCommons

Like Nick Baines, I welcome the launch of the Citizen Ethics Network, an initiative that can only be positive and that I, too, will be following. The wider and more democratic this conversation is, the better. Like every other reader I have favourites and, let’s say, "lesser favourites" among the contributors to the launch pamphlet but what really matters is to hear voices other than the great and good. I hope the debate takes off.

Again like Nick Baines, I admire politicians on the whole, and think it’s important they not be misunderstood. Undoubtedly they are motivated to a great extent by ideology: that is the aspect of the political mind that is most often ignored by journalists and the public, it seems to me. They are also motivated by personal ambition – by no means a bad thing – and calculation as well as conviction pervades everything they do. If we want politicians to be valued, we need to recognise and accept that. Robin Cook’s resignation over Iraq was widely admired, and rightly so. But the public ethics that denies Tony Blair’s genuine conviction over Iraq is the same distorted ethics that beatifies Cook for a move that was also, looked at realistically, a powerful marker for a Labour leadership bid. Many in his party wish he were still here.

What I think is wrong, though – and 180 degrees wrong, in the particular case of the Telegraph’s revelations about "expensesgate" – is to see the media as having some sort of duty to go easy on politicians, or to build up confidence in them. Expensesgate – not so much the claims themselves as the attempted cover-up satirised in last night’s BBC drama On Expenses – was a public scandal of such a scale that the Telegraph’s conduct was amply justified, and deserves both applause and reward. The same should go to Heather Brooke. An iron law of politics, and public ethics, is that the friendlier the media are to politicians, the less free citizens are. In Venezuela, the President even has his own, over-lengthy show. More Paxmanlike scrutiny is needed here, not less. And one positive change would be if we showed more appreciation of those politicians – Peter Hain, Ben Bradshaw and Margaret Beckett come to mind on the Labour side, but they have their counterparts in other parties – who are often ready to face such scrutiny, including that of studio audiences.

What I do worry about, and something I do think puts good people off politics, is today's routine invasion and even more routine surrender of privacy. People will always be interested in the lives of public figures: there was a joke in the 1970s about Ted Heath looking down on "the unemployed". But Heath’s solitary life would today be subjected to wholly wrong and damaging inspection; he would be expected to justify and explain himself. I have no ready solutions to the problem, though I support the Human Rights Act and agree with Max Mosley about privacy. But I do think we need to avoid a situation such as exists in America, where it is unimaginable that a single person could enter the White House. I fear we may be moving towards a new public hypocrisy in which gay people are more visible at all levels in society then ever before – yet anyone but married parents is effectively barred from the very top by a deeply conservative public morality. In the US, again, admirable republic though it is, no one could reach the White House without money. Or faith.

Mention of which brings me eventually to Rowan Williams, whose superficially anodyne article in the pamphlet complains about our society being influenced by a distorted version of Darwinism. I wonder in passing what social movement opposes, misunderstands, distorts and slanders Darwinism more than Christianity does. But I won’t pursue that. I’m more interested in Williams’s apple-pie thought that

the importance of the family isn’t a sentimental idealising of domestic life or a myth of patriarchy; it is about understanding that you grow in emotional intelligence and maturity because of the presence of a reality that is unconditionally faithful or dependable.

I like the way he tries to deflect feminist suspicion simply by the choice and juxtaposition of two words. Perhaps I'm hyper-sensitive about this marginal comment. But it seems to me to reflect just the kind of questionable "pro-family" attitude I’ve been complaining about, to my mind impliedly ranking Ted Heath below Gordon Brown as a public servant simply because Brown has a wife and children.

A real threat to our public ethics comes from the determination of some religious believers, and the readiness at least of their leaders, to justify and maintain discrimination on the grounds of personal sexual conduct. Parts of the media join in with glee. If we could get rid of that thinking, and the kind of hypocrisy that dares complain about bigotry after forcing a man to withdraw from a bishopric precisely in order to appease prurient bigots, our public ethics would be the better for it.

This piece first appeared at The Wardman Wire

The jury system is attacked from all sides – by those who believe juries cannot cope with fraud cases, by those who think they are prejudiced and now even by those who think them harsh on householders who defend themselves. Juries deserve our support, and this report suggests changes that could make their verdicts safer and better. Suspicion of juries, though, is merely a modern fear of democracy. Thomas's report vindicates many people's instinctive conviction that jury trial is the vital guarantee of fairness in the criminal justice system. Justice is less at risk from the prejudices of juries than from those of professionals and politicians.

Read my full piece on Professor Thomas's report, Are juries fair?, at Comment is Free.

A Christian is prevented from wearing a cross at work, though her employer lets Muslim workers wear the hijab, and Sikhs the kara. Clear discrimination, surely? So says Nadia Eweida, who yesterday took her case against BA to the Court of Appeal. Liberty's director Shami Chakrabarti supports her, arguing that BA's policy was an intrusion into religious freedom. Eweida's claim may indeed seem reasonable at first blush, but the principle she and Liberty argue for is wrong. I hope they fail.

Read my full piece on Nadia Eweida's case at Comment is Free.

The leadership is indeed now settled

Vali... | CreativeCommons

Today's "secret ballot" initative by Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt appears already to have run into the snow. Hoon and Hewitt have chosen a desperate but inadequate dice to throw, have been outmaneouvred, and in any case have acted too late.

I understand the desperation. Although Gordon Brown's personal performance has improved and the fight is now being taken more effectively to the Conservatives, the truth remains that he as leader is the biggest drag on Labour's vote. The one thing the government could do to transform its chances at the general election would be to dump its leader. It should have done so last year. But for a pair of MPs with ministerial but Blairite pasts and no substantial political bases of their own, and who are both standing down from Parliament, to call for a transparent device to circumvent the normal consitutional rules, and for this call to be supported only by usual suspects like Charles Clarke and Frank Field - that, now, is surely too little to have real political effect. It can easily be characterised as "unconstitutional" and without doubt some constituency and union activists will be angered by the attempt to cut them out of the process. Those problems could be overcome if there were sufficient, directed momentum against Gordon Brown. There's clearly not. More seriously, though, their approach does nothing to resolve the question of who should succeed.

Second, it looks as though they've been wrong-footed. The timing of the coup, on this snowy day and immediately after Gordon Brown performed well at PMQs, seemed odd, and was odd. It could hardly have been more favourable to Downing Street. Perhaps they were somehow pre-empted or provoked to make their move when they did. Otherwise they made a mistake. Surely they should have waited at least for the immediate aftermath of some clear mis-step by Brown.

But in any case, this is too late. Labour should have replaced Gordon Brown some time ago, but the chance has gone, and they're stuck with him. Where were Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt last June, when James Purnell resigned? That was the chance to remove Brown. Hoon did resign from the Cabinet then in fact - but you, like me, may have missed that at the time. He said he was doing so for "family reasons", making no comment about Brown.

I suspect quite a few members and former members of the Cabinet suffer from a lack of political courage combined with a lack of political nous. It was obvious last June that that was the best, and last, chance to strike against Brown. I can understand the cowardice that led some people to do nothing then, although courage was surely easier for those whose careers were in any event ending and had nothing to lose, like Geoff Hoon. What I can't understand is their failing to realise that that inaction then was in effect a decision to go with Brown all the way.

The only thing that could seriously destablise the Prime Minister now would be either a major resignation - Alistair Darling's say, or Lord Mandelson's - or a direct challenge from David Miliband or Jon Cruddas. Mandelson and Darling back Brown. As far as Jon Cruddas is concerned, inaction makes sense: his goal of inheriting a left-shifting party this year depends on his having clean hands now.

Whether inaction makes sense for David Miliband, I don't know, and the question matters less than it did. He ought to have challenged last year, and his failure to do so was the outstanding failure of nous and courage. Now, he couldn't unseat Brown even if he did resign, and to do so would surely be mad. But his delay today in backing the Prime Minister makes his disloyalty clear, and damages his future. I think he missed his chance to be Prime Minister in 2009, and will never have as good a chance again.

If Hoon and Hewitt wanted, as they said, to settle the leadership issue one way or the other - well, they've succeeded in that.

Chris Grayling says householders should be protected by the law unless they react with "grossly disproportionate" force. The law on self-defence has only recently been clarified, in fact, and it's worth noting how friendly it already is to the victim of a burglary. It's long been clear that you are entitled to use reasonable force in defence of people or property. But section 76 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 spells out that whether the force you use is reasonable depends on the circumstances as you believed them to be – even if your belief was unreasonable. The jury must take into account that you cannot be expected to "weigh to a nicety" what you should do to defend yourself – and in effect, you get the benefit of the doubt if you only did what you honestly and instinctively thought necessary. What the law does not permit is disproportionate force; Grayling's proposal is that the ceiling on what a victim is entitled to do should be raised. But his response, making disproportionate force legitimate across the board, is itself disproportionate.

Read my full piece on Chris Grayling and his proposals following the Munir Hussain case, at Comment is Free.

An apostate's view

The Fire Window, Manchester Cathedral

We've heard a number of religious views about the Pope's extraordinary offer to allow Church of England priests who can't stomach women bishops to convert to Rome - even though some of them are married, and even being allowed to keep to some of their Anglican traditions. Some feminists have criticised it as predatory; some have predictably welcomed it, and some bishops look like taking it up. This is everybody's business, though, not just believers' business - just as much as private clubs' membership rules are in my view everyone's business, say, or political parties' candidate selection, or indeed political defections. Anyway, I've never noticed any reluctance on the part of Popes or Bishops to opine on non-religious matters. Here, then, is the view of an excommunicated apostate. Believers are more than welcome to correct me if there's anything I misunderstand.

I agree that the Pope is being predatory here, not to say wholly cynical: you have to admire the old man's chutzpah in trying to annex part of the C of E in advance of his state visit next year. Perhaps he hopes to Newmanise the whole of England.

What is most baffling about this affair though is how any Anglo-Catholic can see the issue of women bishops (perhaps together with a perceived liberal drift on homosexuality - one imperceptible to outsiders) as a reason to turn to Rome. Can any of them really, in conscience, now say they suddenly accept Catholic dogmas, having lived contrary to them all their vocations long?

Let's take the issue of whether scripture contains all things necessary for salvation, as we're told Anglicans believe. That's not Rome's position - it sees tradition as just as important. Do these Anglo-Catholic defectors claim to have changed their mind on this - or did they never agree with what seems the official Anglican doctrine in the first place?

Getting a bit closer to the bone, if the question of whether bishops can be women is so crucial, why do they attach so much less importance to the question whether priests can be married? Some of the potential defectors are themselves married - conduct in their own personal lives that is directly contrary to Roman Catholic belief about the nature of priesthood. And have they been living in accordance with Humanae Vitae? Do they propose to from now on?

Even closer to the bone, for some, is the issue of homosexuality. George Pitcher certainly thinks quite a few potential defectors are themselves gay. It's okay to be a gay priest in the C of E, so long as you don't practice it: as I understand it (from Issues in Human Sexuality, para. 5.19) clergy who come out as "homophile in orientation" but who accept abstinence are to be welcomed and employed; and candidates for ordination will not be quizzed about their celibacy unless there are strong reasons for doing so. But in the Pope's church, men presenting "deep seated homosexual tendencies" cannot be ordained at all, whether or not they practice their sexuality; and it is even prepared to use psychological tests to root out these tendencies. Again, therefore, to be conscious of ones homosexuality seems to this outsider just as contrary to the Catholic idea of priesthood as to be married. On reflection, some of these priests may be forced to conclude they are excluded from Rome just as they would exclude others from their own church. Only unmarried straight or effectively asexual Anglo-Catholics can, it seems to me, unashamedly aspire to be Catholic priests.

Most critically, though, potential defectors have, until now, been happy to be part of a church that rejects papal authority. Indeed, opposition to his authority was the rock on which the Church of England was founded almost five hundred years ago. How can these people now say that just because of women bishops that's all forgiven and forgotten - a little mistake - and that they're now happy to do as the Pope tells them? They may have convinced themselves that he's merely some sort of primus inter pares; but he certainly doesn't see things that way. The defectors have been happy to serve in a church that's at least partially democratic and to argue their case against reform; if they turn to Rome, they'll find they have no say whatever, for instance on whether offers like this should be made, or when some future Pope unilaterally decides priests can be married, or women, after all (as I predict he will within fifty, then within a hundred, years). The Pope in Rome may only rarely be infallible, but he's always the one who decides.

The gulf between Canterbury and Rome seems to me as wide as the Channel and as high as the Alps, and any Anglo-Catholic who defects now must explain why the prospect of women bishops has made him change his mind on other, more fundamental doctrines; or else, if he claims always to have accepted those doctrines, why he hasn't been a Catholic and lived by them before now.

Many atheists will, I think, conclude that in reality this is nothing to do with the details of the dogma of either denomination, and that theological disputation about it is just a thick cloud of incense. Isn't this really about some extremely conservative-minded people's deep-rooted commitment against women's equality - a commitment that transcends and overwhelms all other doctrinal, spiritual and ecclesiastical considerations and loyalties?

Gordon Brown's conference speech

It wasn't the game-changer Labour was crying out for - but Gordon Brown's speech to the Labour conference today was a much better effort than many expected, and approaches, at least, the kind of argument and the kind of vision he needs to set out if next year's election is to be a contest.

He opened by talking of changing the world: it was good, for Labour supporters, to see him lift his vision. But the bread and butter of winning for Labour is to flesh out that vision in a programme. He followed up with a long, relentless, deliberately extended drumming out of Labour's many achievements in office. Labour does need to remind the public of this, but in a way that's heard instead of making people tune out with boredom. I don't know whether that'll work. More importantly, from early on and throughout his speech he focused on the clear choice Britain faces next year, and again and again he cast that choice in terms of opting to favour the interests of the majority or those of a privileged few - surely the right light for him to try to throw on Conservative policies. He came back to that attack at the end of his speech, too, showing a determination to get the message across.

I liked the way he explained how he had acted in the financial crisis and to stave off depression: I almost thought this passage was too quick, and that he could gain by taking more time to explain this, impressive part of his record to the public in more detail. He is really missing a trick on all this. He told an anecdote about a complacent bank chief, for instance, telling Brown his bank was in fine shape - only for the PM to discover than, in truth, it was shaky. A big problem for Brown is that he seems to be part of the financial establishment and to be on the side of bankers - he needs to reposition himself as the angry, parsimonious and grumpy champion of the taxpayer against the banks, and he could usefully express more astonishment about actions he has had to take and more anger about what some banks have done. Alistair Darling's planned legislation on bonuses is not nearly tough enough: it may not be morally admirable, but people want some of their anger taken out on rich bank employees, and Labour should be offering much tougher action. Anyway, if you believe in a fair society, huge bonuses aren't just wrong where the recipient has been negligent. And finally, he expressed determination to recover for the public all the money lent to support the banks - but I wanted to hear more of this, and for him to paint a grim, almost horrifying vision of Brown as the inexorable public bailiff-in-chief with a debt to collect over five years.

He made some good pledges - the one not to cut spending on schools but to raise it, for instance, was important. But there was, as last year, a bit too much schemery, with quite a few good and welcome but relatively small ideas that are too forgettable and cannot amount to a big vision in themselves. Examples were the skilled internships and green work placements he offered.

On fiscal responsibility I thought he was good. Last year I was impatient with his technique of setting medium and long terms goals by legislation - a target alone does nothing to reach itself. I can see the international credibility argument for a Fiscal Responsibility Bill, though, and he promised a similar approach to achieving a high and sustained level of overseas aid. Perhaps I was wrong and he is right - still, I'd like him to explain why this use of binding pre-commitments is not gimmickry but substantial policy. The best point he made though - and something I'd like to hear more of - was to remind conference he had squeezed spending before, after 1997, while still achieving important policies like the New Deal and minimum wage. To argue he can play the same trick again is a good argument he should make more often.

Half an hour in was when the speech began to get really serious. He made important policy pledges: that the minimum wage and working tax credits will go up every year under him. This is more like the substance he needs to produce.

Bravely, though, and impressively, he has dared take on and take forward some of Tony Blair's thinking with controversial proposals about housing for teenage parents - they will be given supervised accommodation and support, not simply the keys to a flat - and pledged the extension of Family Intervention Projects to Britain's 50,000 "most chaotic families". This is bold, interventionist talk that will displease much of the liberal left but that may offer a way to reconnect with core Labour voters. He hinted at applying the target-driven approach to improving public services more aggressively to community policing - an important idea that meets an increasing concern, especially after the Fiona Pilkington case.

Labour needs a really big idea, though - and Brown's proposed "National Care Service" may be the sort of thing required. Long term care is of course a massive social and financial problem that causes fear among many families and wipes out savings - the way illness and injury did before the NHS. If Brown can put real flesh on this idea and convince people he has a way forward on care, votes will follow. The challenge will be the detail, but his pledge of free personal care at home for those most in need of it is a decent start.

Finally, on the constitution, his proposals to allow recall of misbehaving MPs and to abolish the hereditary Lords were minor but welcome. His promise of a referendum on the alternative vote system was a real surprise, however. I'm not sure I'm in favour of it, and the move has a flavour of cynicism - almost all his cabinet and Labour critics seem to be behind electoral reform right now - but it is bold. It was the confirmation, to me, that he may now at least dimly "get" the need for him to offer much more daring plans for the next Parliament.

"Dream no small dreams," Brown said, quoting - well, I'm not sure yet whether it was Goethe or Victor Hugo. Warm, inspiring words for a Labour politician. More hard-headedly, they're good strategic advice over the next six months. He's finally offered some forward vision, and given some hope he can put forward big ideas. If this marks the start of a real change in Brown's approach, and he can work this sort of thinking up into a convincing manifesto platform - who knows? We could yet have a real election next year.

This post first appeared at The Wardman Wire

You've not heard much from me recently - I've been taking advantage of the silly season to catch up on other things. And my blog break is going to continue for another week. I'm taking a complete break, getting away from everything, even the intarwebs thingy, and plan to recharge.

See you later in September.

The past decade has seen widening differences in income and wealth, which taxation and regulation have failed to address. When New Labour was first elected, it established the Low Pay Commission to measure the claims of workers for a higher minimum wage against the wider economic impact, particularly on employment. There is now a compelling case for a high pay commission to measure the claims of top earners that their rewards are justified and necessary, even if they offend natural justice and our sense of fairness.

So wrote Vince Cable in yesterday's Guardian, supporting Compass's call for a High Pay Commission to investigate pay at the top, and come forward with proposals to rein it in. Compass's initiative deserves backing - but Cable's words of support worry me.

By suggesting the highest paid should be made to justify their incomes, he implies individual desert is the issue, and indeed he goes on to make clear he's fine about Bill Gates being worth more than the £31.1 billion interest Britain pays on its national debt. It's rewards for failure and uselessness that he really objects to, as David Aaronovitch has rightly pointed out. But why be so timid - so narrowly, individualistically moral about it? The point isn't whether such and such a banker has properly "earned" his six-figure bonus, or whether a premiership footballer has "earned" his six-figure weekly pay (I think Vince is slightly out of date about football salaries, at least at the very top). The real question is whether in Britain today where many of those who are lucky enough to have work survive on the minimum wage or less and where average income (distorted upwards by Frank Lampard and Stephen Hester) is twenty thousand or so it's right that anyone should receive such vast revenues, regardless of what they've done to "earn" them. It's not about market or merit, but equality.

Much greater equality would be better for us all. The only serious question is how to achieve it, although the evidence suggests that doesn't matter. I'd be happy whether we tax or, as David Blackburn suggests, "regulate" (another word for 'legislate") big bonuses and pay out of existence. A commission to look into it would be a start but it should not be a tribunal before whom the rich are forced - or allowed - to defend their privileges. It should work out a mechanism to reduce the greatest incomes, as the minimum wage aims at raising the lowest.