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Gordon Brown's speech to Labour conference

Gordon Brown's speech in Manchester this afternoon was good enough to take the pressure off him for a few days; but it changed nothing fundamentally. It was, as Andrew Neil said on telly straight afterwards, Gordon Brown as we'd seen him before. There was nothing really new, and no idea big enough to lift Brown up to the level of the political challenge he faces.

He began the speech smilingly, apparently trying hard to project a more relaxed image than we're used to - but that soon disappeared as he told us there was "a lot to be serious about". The theme he gave the speech was the idea of a "new settlement for our times", and he spoke about building a fair society. Fair enough: he told us repeatedly he's on the side of fairness, "hard-working families" and those on middle and modest incomes. Filling that out, though, was much harder work. There were far too many platitudes in this speech - politically vacuous words about developing the talents of all the people, of aspiring to be the party of the family and of law and order, of putting people first, of markets being the servant of the people, of wanting a "British century". To be fair, there was a fair amount of detail, filling out the well-trodden paths of New Labour government. He said nursery education will be rolled out to two-year-olds, that general health check-ups will be offered to all the over-forties, that "help" of an unspecified kind will be given to those paying for long-term care and that cancer patients will have free prescriptions. All good stuff worth doing, as he said. But some of these detailed ideas were not good. I don't agree for instance with shifting public funding for medical research towards drug development. The pharmaceutical industry is already good at doing that, and needs no subsidy: public funding should be directed at the pure science that offers few obvious short-term financial paybacks to investors but which may just lead to real breakthroughs. Why spend public money helping families with kids get onto the internet? Practically every family that wants to be on it, is, and there are libraries and internet cafes that offer access at quite low prices. That seems to me a useless tranfser of resources. His promise to have offenders doing visible community payback is an old idea warmed up, one that's taken far too long to deliver already and which I doubt will ever happen. The pledge to put into law the commitment to abolish child poverty by 2020 is a pure gimmick: far better to take action to reduce it now than to waste Parliament's time with merely declaratory legislation. Brown won't be proposing to send himself to prison if that target's not met, after all, will he? Nor was I impressed by his talk about more demanding targets for cutting carbon emissions by 2050. The important thing is not the precise level of any targets, but doing something now to meet them - today, tomorrow and every day after that.

The main problem about the speech, though, was simply that it was so detailed. The biggest cheer and applause Brown got was the moment when he thanked NHS workers for serving a great principle, of free treatment for everyone when they need it. What Brown needed, to build on that and make the public think again about him, was a big idea of his own on something like the scale and stature of the NHS idea: one big, simple concept the Conservatives could never copy, that would attract voters and that would show a bold way forward. Difficult, that, I know: there's so little scope for big public investment projects in the new few years that it's almost impossible to propose, say, a national legal service to support victims, witnesses and consumers (Brown promised a victims' commissioner, which is a much smaller idea, unlikely to have much real impact), a properly-funded national insurance scheme for pensions or a massive transformation of public transport. But something like that was needed if he was really to seize the agenda. I've suggested in the past that equality offers a better umbrella under which to collect a themed series of policies, but even that would require a much more powerful programme than Brown offered today. Announcing free long-term care would have been better, on its own, than the big list he offered. There was actually a crescendo passage in the speech in which Brown spoke about Labour being best when it offered big, revolutionary ideas that are now accepted by everyone - and that made me prick up my ears waiting for Brown's revolutionary idea. It never came.

One positive was that Brown was much better when attacking the Tories: he needs to do a lot more of that if he has any future. There were mistakes, too, though, like the mawkishly-delivered anecdotes about "dads who can now afford birthday parties for their kids" and so on, which made me think of Brown in the role of Scrooge. I thought a long passage near the beginning gave an important clue to what's wrong with Brown, though: he spoke about a new "global age", surveying the world scene like an LSE guest lecturer, or like an ex-Prime Minister speaking to a big conference in the States. It's as though Brown's long service as a G8 finance minister has turned him into the sort of wiseacre statesman who sits on investment bank boards, who can talk reasonably fairly convincingly about the supposed new challenges of the supposedly new global age of supposedly ever more rapid changes, but who's no longer in real touch with people. Whose political edge has been blunted. Talk about "believing in Britain" and its successes is no good to a government in the state ours is now, but we got a lot of that, about how "nothing has ever broken Britain" and how great volunteers are. That, though, is losing talk, reminiscent of the way Michael Heseltine used to talk about British firms exporting pizza to Italy. Look how much good that did him.

A disappointing speech, then: if this was the speech of Brown's life, then there can't be much life left in the old slugger. On a day that needed surprise and imagination, it was a speech of unimaginative, unsurprising platitudes fleshed out with decent but unexciting detail - and lacking a compelling idea or programme that would really constitute something that could be called a vision. I now doubt Brown will ever be capable of rising to the challenge he and his party face - this was his one chance to prove the doubters wrong, and he failed. He may have quietened the critics for a few days, but he's done no more than that, and with his oratorical bolt now shot I think Brown will be weaker next month than he is now. The only thing that might keep him labouring away until the election is the lack of a credible, purposeful alternative leader - and a collective decision by the cabinet that power now is doomed, and that it's better to go down with the captain in 2010 and fight for future prizes.