New Labour has been a trillion-pound folly

If you had left Britain just after the 1997 election and returned in Autumn 2007 to hear Gordon Brown's first speech as party leader to a Labour conference, you would have been struck by a worrying familiarity in what was being said.

In 1997 Tony Blair pledged he would be "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". A decade later Prime Minister Brown promised to "punish crime and prevent it by dealing with the root causes". In 1997 Blair told us "we will tackle the unacceptable level of anti-social behaviour on our streets". Ten years later Brown insisted he would "take action against anti-social behaviour". In 1997 Blair promised us "a Government that seeks to restore trust in politics in this country". Ten years on Brown vowed to give us "a new kind of politics... in order to rebuild trust in the British people in our

democracy". And so on.

But there is one important difference between 1997 and 2007: during the last decade, this Government has increased public spending by over a trillion pounds of our money (about £1,229,100,000,000), in an attempt to implement its 1997 promises to transform our hospitals, schools, police, pensions and social services.

Yet what have we got for the extra trillion or so of our money that the Government has spent on our behalf? The best public services in the world? Or a massive squandering of our money on misjudged policies and increasing bureaucracy?

In the NHS, as the number of managers has gone up, the number of hospital beds has decreased. In 1997 there were around 12 hospital beds per manager - now there are less than five. Yet the NHS spends