In Praise of John Major

While doing some clearing out today I came across some old maazines including a 2010 copy of the Speccie which included this acticle by Peter Oborne calling for a re-appraisal of the administration of John Major.

The article looks even more apposite today than it did in 2010 as it is obvious that a number of the best reforming ideas not just of Tony Blair's administration but that of David Cameron's as well started off while John Major was in government.

Here are a few extracts from the article.

"It is becoming obvious, especially with the benefit of hindsight, that John Major was a formidable leader with substantial achievements to his credit.

 

"But the narrative of John Major’s hopelessness was so strong that for many years it was impossible to make the case in his favour. For example, in his Labour conference speech last year Gordon Brown paid tribute to Tony Blair for ‘starting’ the Northern Irish peace process. Actually it was John Major who launched the peace process in 1993 with the Downing Street Declaration, which led to the IRA ceasefire. Politically this was brave, not least because it meant jeopardising the support of Ulster Unionist MPs at a time when the Conservative majority was wafer-thin. Yet his very distinguished role in ending the Troubles has been airbrushed from history.

 

"Let’s now examine John Major’s economic achievement. He became prime minister at the height of a recession, yet he and Ken Clarke handed over the economy to New Labour in 1997 in faultless condition. Unemployment was 1.6 million and falling, national finances were sound and growth steady. Yet Gordon Brown has never once acknowledged this inheritance — and indeed he has often gone out of his way to deny or distort it.

 

"Nor is John Major given credit for stopping the euro. It is reasonable to praise Gordon Brown for keeping Britain out of the single currency. But Brown as chancellor would never have been able to prevent Tony Blair taking us in but for John Major’s very brave stand at Maastricht in arranging a British opt-out from European Monetary Union. But for that opt-out, we would today have been unable to use any of the weapons which the government has used to fend off recession: quantitative easing, dramatic currency easing and demand management. And yet Major was slammed for that Maastricht Treaty, both at the time and ever since.

 

"John Major’s most enduring achievement, however, concerns public services. There is a myth — it was repeated recently by Gordon Brown — that traffic cone hotlines and the citizens’ charter were the limit of his achievement. However, it is easy to show that his government was stunningly radical when it came to education, health and the welfare state. His educational reforms gave schools autonomy from local authority control, encouraged parents’ right to choose and set head teachers free to run their own schools. In health, John Major introduced the internal market, the purchaser provider split and GP fund-holding.

 

"All of these changes were denounced by Tony Blair. Labour’s 1997 manifesto pledged to ‘restore the NHS as a public service working co-operatively for patients’. Frank Dobson, Labour’s new health secretary, immediately scrapped patient choice and GP fund-holding. Likewise David Blunkett sabotaged grant-maintained schools, ended their financial independence and imposed an array of centrally imposed targets, few of which worked.

"After Tony Blair won the 2001 election he finally realised that John Major’s view of the public services had actually been rather visionary after all. So he set about restoring patient choice, brought back GP fund-holding and recreated the internal market. It was too embarrassing to restore grant-maintained schools so they were reincarnated under a new name as ‘trust schools’. John Major’s derided city technology colleges, which he had personally rescued in July 1991, were relaunched as city academies.

 

"So the so-called ‘radicalism’ of Tony Blair’s final few years in office was actually a laborious recreation of the John Major reforms that had been reversed by New Labour in 1997. These ‘Blairite’ reforms have now been put on hold by Gordon Brown — but David Cameron plans to implement them in a truly thoroughgoing way after the election.

 

"Then there were the minor achievements, such as the National Lottery, which has raised £25 billion for good causes.

 

"... In sharp contrast to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown he genuinely believed in cabinet government ... There was no sofa government and no attempt to establish control from the centre, the misconception that has turned New Labour into such a disaster.

 

"Major’s government gathered a reputation for division and there was indeed a rather honourable split over Europe. But there was very little of the hatred, the plotting and distrust between the most senior figures of government over narrow personal matters that has damaged New Labour so much in power. Indeed the most senior members of the cabinet — Major, Clarke, Heseltine, Hurd, Howard — got on pretty well.

 

"The John Major government is remembered as sleazy. But this idea was in part the creation of the brilliant New Labour propaganda machine and in any case Tory sleaze was dwarfed by the systemic New Labour corruption and deceit which has disfigured the last decade.

 

"And consider Gulf War One in 1990. Under Major it was well-planned, with limited objectives, a considered exit strategy, and no lying. What a contrast to the Iraq invasion in 2003!

 

"John Major will not go down in history as a great prime minister. He lacked the language and the inner poise and made one reputation-destroying howler — Black Wednesday in 1992, with sterling’s forced eviction from the exchange rate mechanism.

 

"New Labour ran a brilliant, though unprincipled, operation to discredit him. It became fashionable to mock John Major by imitating his voice and mannerisms, a trend started by Alastair Campbell when he was political editor of the Daily Mirror. Snobbery was part of it. As a youngish and relatively inexperienced political reporter on the Evening Standard at the time, I am afraid that I swallowed this vindictive analysis and feel very uneasy about it today.

 

"John Major was good at substance, but wretched at spin. New Labour was the opposite. For many years this public relations expertise worked for New Labour. However, over time I believe that John Major will come to be regarded as a more honest, decent and competent prime minister than either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. He left Britain ... a better place than he found it."