Johann Hari: A winning formula for Gordon Brown

As Blair faces the final curtain, the Chancellor must show that politics is conducted in the future tense

Thursday, 10 May 2007

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Tony Blair is embarked on more goodbye concerts than Frank Sinatra. We've already had the tearful farewell to Labour Party conference last October and the dewy adieu to Northern Ireland this week. There's three more to go: he'll leave Downing Street with a valedictory speech in seven weeks, and emerge in Washington DC to collect his Congressional Gold Medal and say so-long-pardner to Bush some time soon after.

But for today, it's Goodbye Number Three. He will appear in Sedgefield at 10.30am to resign the leadership of the Labour Party. Regrets? He's had a few, but then again, too few to mention. (Don't mention the war).

And so Gordon Brown's long march to Number Ten is nearing its last steps. What can he do to make sure he is not a Jim Callaghan, with his premiership a dwindling footnote to a long period of Labour rule? The figures are much better for Brown than the Tory press is hyping. In last week's local elections, David Cameron's New Tories received exactly 0.4 per cent more support than Michael Howard just before he was kicked to death by the British people at the ballot box.

In a string of iconic Middle England seats, the Tory vote actually fell: Watford, Bedford, Milton Keynes, North Hertfordshire. In Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle, the Tories do not have a single councillor. The Cameron Factor is wowing the wildly biased press, but leaving the public cold. Yes, Brown will have to fight like hell - but there is everything to play for.

However, he can't continue to adopt the tactic he used for last week's locals from now on. He can't simply sell the Government's record over the past decade, and answer every inquiry with a string of billions already invested. Politics is fought primarily in the future tense.

Brown needs ambitious we-will-do-this-for-you plans for the future, to contrast with the passive, flaccid vision of a government that merely sets "frameworks" proposed by Cameron. The rumours that Brown will launch a massive home-building strategy led by the excellent housing minister Yvette Cooper would be a good start, to deal with the millions of people just out of reach of the housing ladder.

Here are two more ideas, dealing with problems at the opposite ends of the age range - teenagers and the elderly - to extend this Brownite vision of a government on your side, doing things you could never do alone.

When it comes to the young, the Government has been pretty good at building up programmes and places to help them - up to the age of 12. There are SureStart centres to help toddlers, and a massive number of well-funded after-school clubs.

But when the hormones kick in, the Government checks out. In Britain today, teenagers have nowhere to go. They are increasingly banned from gathering in shopping centres and the other commercialised spheres which pass for public space today. Teenagers need room in which to express their nature - to be loud, to shriek, to strut. That cannot be done solely in poky bedrooms and the small crevices where they are not subject to dispersal orders.

The junior minister David Lammy has been arguing for a long time that there is a solution to hand: build a network of Byker Groves across Britain, well-funded, free-to-enter youth centres where teenagers can mooch around and do their thing. Brown should ask Camila Batmanghelidjh - the heroic founder of Kids' Company - to take charge. She has shown in south London how a loving, supervised place to hang out can turn around even the most disturbed kids.

This is a policy with cross-class, cross-party appeal. Do you want your teenager to have a safe place to hang out? Do you want fewer lanky kids wandering the streets, getting into trouble? This would trounce Cameron, who offers wet-eyed sympathy for Camila when he knows his "frameworks" will never spread her vision far.

At the other end of life - the elderly - there is just as much scope for Brown's ambition. The Government has been good at getting means-tested tax credits to the poorest pensioners, lifting their income by as much as £70 a week.

But the problems dwarf this advance. The state of Britain's old people's homes today is obscene. As I've written before, I had to move my granny out of two homes that were so appalling I was afraid for her life. This week, the Commission for Social Care Inspection announced that one in three homes are barely "adequate", and hundreds are "poor."

There are 400,000 people in these homes, and more every year. Almost every old person lives in terror of ending up in one, with good reason. With an ageing population, in time this is going to become as big an issue in Britain as schools and hospitals. So what can Brown do? When an elderly person is assessed as being unable to look after herself any more, she is almost immediately moved into a home, costing the Government anything from £14,000 to £30,000 a year for the rest of their lives. Wouldn't it be better to make those funds transferable to her family to provide care of their own? Many people, if given £14,000 worth of visiting nurses and home improvements a year, would provide much better care than any impersonal home. It should be a simple option, easily chosen.

And for those who still end up in a home, there is one move that can make all the difference: improve the staff-to-resident ratio. If a carer has ten old people to look after, all she can do is thrust a cup of tea at a resident and run out. If a carer has only five people, she can stop to talk and get to know the resident.

It's the difference between being in prison and being looked after. But at the moment, nobody even knows what the national staff-to-resident ratio is. I have phoned all the government departments, and it seems nobody is even bothering to count.

Brown should make this a political issue as big as class sizes, and commit to an absolute maximum of five carers to every resident. This is another issue with cross-party, cross-class appeal. Let him give emotional speeches about the generation who saved the world from fascism, and how we owe them this at least. Let him point out that whenever the Tories take over a council, they slash the meals-on-wheels budget to pay for tax cuts.

This is the way for Brown to win. He should identify the big problems - the housing crisis, teenage boredom, neglect of the elderly - and show how a withered Tory state that leaves us atomised and alone could never deal with them.

For Tony Blair, the end is near, and (start the piano, please) now he faces the final curtain. But for the Labour Party, if it shows enough ambition, this could be a moment to take up another part of the song: "to say it clear, to state my case, of which I'm certain." It's the only way to win again.

j.hari@independent.co.uk