Press Office

Aired: Sunday, 18 March, 2007 10:00
Sunday Live with Adam Boulton

18th March 2007

Interview with former Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, M.P.

All excerpts to be attributed to Sky News’ ‘Sunday Live with Adam Boulton.’.  

Boulton:  Thank you Mr. Clarke for joining us. Obviously a lot of people are going to be reviewing the record of Gordon Brown over these past eleven budgets, these past ten years.  One you’d have to give him presumably is the decision to hand the interest rate decision to the Bank of England Committee, something you actually opposed at the time?

Clarke:  I did actually sort of critcise it from the front bench because I was sitting in whilst the Conservatives were waiting to decide who to replace me, in fact every Conservative Chancellor had been trying to persuade his or her Prime Minister to do just the same thing for some years to come and I think it was the best decision Gordon made.  I was unable to persuade John Major, every previous Chancellor was unable to persuade Margaret Thatcher, John was the only Chancellor who was against it, as it happened, but right of centre politicians have always believed in independent banks.  That was the probably the best decision Gordon makes and he keeps dining out on it as it were.  It was practically the first thing he did, the one thing he planned in opposition and since that time the Bank’s been responsible for monetary policy, which hasn’t been too difficult because inflation has been kept very much under control anyway by globalization and the impact of India and China and other countries on prices throughout the world.

Boulton:  We have of course also had above trend growth over this period and fairly high level of investment in the public services while taxation has gone up, so on balance by his standards you have to say Gordon Brown’s been a successful Chancellor, wouldn’t you?

Clarke:  Well he’s not been too bad, but no, you asked me about the independence of the Bank of England which I’m prepared to praise, no I think his record otherwise is indifferent and has some bad points, like he’s got the public financiers into a quite dreadful mess, has raised the level of taxation but he’s had to raise the level of borrowing to a dangerous extent as well and he’s left his successor with a dreadful problem of how to get public spending under control and how to stop the level of debt getting to truly unsustainable levels. Growths not been particularly spectacular we’ve been good and average, it’s ‘above trend’ you say if you put trend for the British economy down at two point five percent but we’re not the most spectacular performing economy…

Boulton:  It’s also been a lot better than the E.U. and the United States hasn’t it?

Clarke:  ...and we’ve been completely out performed by say, Ireland, next door to us. 

Boulton:  Yeah but isn’t that simply because where Ireland came from, if you look at the equivalent economies, France, Germany, even the United States the growth actually has been comparatively good?

Clarke:  Well you’ve chosen three, I mean if you put us in the European league table at the moment we’re well down it and this isn’t only where Ireland’s come from, look where it’s going to.  GDP per head in Ireland is now higher than that in Britain, the growth rate in Ireland and the performance of the Irish economy has been much better than ours in recent years and ours is getting into difficulties.  The problem next week is that our present level of growth isn’t very good in so far as we’re sustaining growth because of immigration levels into this country, which are benefiting the economy, creation of new jobs is largely in the public sector and it’s very, very heavily based on debt. And it’s beginning to affect ordinary people now, wages have not gone up very much and people have found that their taxation has gone up rather faster, their bills they can’t avoid paying like council tax, their mortgage, gas, electricity are going up faster than the average person’s income.  So the average Joe finds that what you might call his discretionary income, the money he’s got left over after the bills he has to pay, that he wants to spend on himself and his family, are actually being rather squeezed.  So I don’t think that after ten years the state of the British economy, or the state of the average British citizen and tax payer is very good, which is why, I don’t call him a bad Chancellor, he hasn’t wreaked the economy, but he’s been fairly lucky and his record in my opinion is fairly undistinguished. 

Boulton:  Do you think you can credibly say that he’s ripped the heart out of the NHS, the National Health Service?

Clarke:  Well he and his government in which he’s served have made a terrible mess of the NHS.  They started ridiculously, they had no policies on the NHS at all when they came in, they thought just having a Labour government would make it better, but when Frank Dobson went they then steadily moved to a process of reform, which I have to admit, in principle was rather based on the reforms that I’d introduced, what used to be called the internal market and the producer- provider divide.  They have made a complete shambles, not Gordon directly, a complete shambles as a government of introducing wave upon wave of reform in a very incompetent way, but they’ve got the finances all wrong, they’ve poured vast sums of money into the Health Service, after the year two thousand, a tremendous increase in the taxpayer’s expenditure on the healthcare that we need and have failed to produce value for money.  Largely I have to say because most of it has gone on an enlarged payroll, better pay, reduced workloads for some of the clinical staff and at the same time you’ve demoralised those same staff by all the structural changes they’ve had.  So sorry to give you a long answer but the history of the Health Service in the last ten years is rather a sad one and at the heart of it Gordon’s financial control of what his colleagues the Secretaries of State for Education have been up to at the Health Service has been dreadful.  I mean they’ve completely failed to produce value for money out of them.

Boulton:  No, I mean the reason why I ask you is that in your home base, Nottingham, David Cameron later on this morning is giving a speech and we already know in advance that he thinks he’s going to lead on the NHS and he’s going to say that this government has ripped the heart out of the NHS and I wonder if that’s credible?  If David Cameron really can credibly say, given the public perception, that he would run that NHS better?

Clarke:  Well I’m very glad that David Cameron and his colleagues have been making the National Health Service really their principle theme for this weekend in Nottingham.  I mean to use the phrase, ‘ripped the heart out’ is one way of putting it, I’d just put it that he’s done terrible damage to the National Health Service.  And many journalists will know if you talk to leading figures inside the Health Service they always have complaints, it’s too difficult to service, no one is ever going to be totally satisfied but at the moment they’re deeply demoralised and they will be at least as hostile about the present government, including Gordon Brown.

Boulton:  As demoralised as they were when you accused doctors of reaching for their wallets?  Do you think as demoralised as they were then?

Clarke:  That is a misquotation, yes I made an unwise after dinner speech, they were very annoyed but no I’ve had plenty of doctors who at the time, of course, spent their time arguing about the first introductions of reforms who do come up to me and say, ‘we didn’t know we were born, it’s got a lot worse since.’

Boulton:  Well sort of even worse than you basically, that’s not much of a recommendation?

Clarke:  [Laughs] Well they were the most difficult trade union I dealt with and they all argued just leave us alone and give us more money but in fact, well if you want to start debating the healthcare system of the late nineteen eighties you can but, we were, we did have to start modernising it and reforming it, we did have to make it more patient based.  Ironically the Labour party adopted exactly the same approach in principal, that I had adopted and my Tory successors by about two years into their period of office.   But they directed it from the centre too much; I had decentralisation, NHS Trusts, G.P. fund holding, budget fund holding and so on.  And they have tried to micromanage from the centre with a stream of ridiculous initiatives.  At the same time they have screwed up its finances, not by denying money to the Health Service, they have poured money into the Health Service, but by failing to ensure that anybody got value for money out of it, in terms of sufficient improvements in patient care.  Of course some things have got better; the Health Service always gets better in its clinical skill and what it delivers to patients slowly over the years.  But given the vast sums of money that the taxpayers have to find to expand things in the last seven or eight years, I think it’s fairly obvious that no one has got any value for money and the staff don’t feel any happier for it.

Boulton:  Are you going to go and see David Cameron’s speech this morning?

Clarke:  Probably, depending on how long it takes. [laughs]  I was there yesterday; it’s completely different, party conference.  The atmosphere has quite changed from the old knock about circus we all used to enjoy twenty years ago.  It is the new politics, it is thoughtful, it is serious, it’s against a background of greenery, of people being quite earnest and serious on stage and setting a theme for the Conservative party to grapple with the public services, to grapple with a very responsible approach to the public finances to get the economy back into proper health and going into quite a sort philosophical debate about the future of public services, which I find quite refreshing.

Boulton:  I mean one thing they haven’t changed, same old Tories as far as you’re concerned on Europe though?  Skeptical as ever aren’t they?  Unconvinced by your arguments?

Clarke:  No, they’re shifting very rapidly.  They are facing up to the realities of government.  The extreme right-wing nationalism which epitomised by party’s approach to Europe and quite a lot of other things about five or six years ago is dying out very rapidly.  Of course you still get the remarks about the over centralisation and all the rest of it, but you listen to every Tory spokesman, they’re anticipating being members of the European Union, they’re anticipating their environmental policies certainly being pursued on a continental scale.  They talk about reform in terms, perhaps of I wouldn’t, but I talk about reform, Europe has a lot of problems to tackle if it’s really going to deliver in terms of economic performance in the global economy.  If we’re going to have a proper sense of cooperation on foreign security policy and so on, but I listen to my colleagues and compared with five years ago their preparing to be European Ministers, their preparing to lead a nation state inside a union of nation states, the European Union.  The idea that whilst everybody else joins the European Union we become a solitary off-shore island is far removed from the new Conservative leaderships’ minds.

Boulton:  Finally Mr Clarke, I’d like to ask you wearing your sort of barrister’s hat, if you like, your former Home Secretary’s hat, where you stand in this argument between the Lord Chancellor and the Chief Justice on life meaning life as far as some murderers are concerned and particularly Ian Huntley has been cited?

Clarke:  Well I’m sorry I have read some of the papers; I haven’t caught up on that particular story.  My mind doesn’t always turn to the more racy law and order stuff.  I obviously got the wrong newspapers.

Boulton: Well what do you think; do you think there are too many geriatric murderers?

Clarke:  I think there are some murderers who should never be released but I think the judges accept that there are people who have demonstrated they are so dangerous that certainly until they’re very elderly and plainly beyond danger they should not be released.  I think the system of recommending minimum sentences is a very good one, I do think the Home Office should rarely, if ever, depart from the minimum sentence that the judge recommends at the end of which people start judging whether someone still represents a danger to the public.  We don’t let people out in this country who still represent a danger to the public and we shouldn’t.  I do think ministers should stop changing the law to try to restrict the discretion of judges.  It is silly to have automatic rules about these things when you have a judge who sits and listens to a considerable amount of the evidence in the individual case.  What I don’t think we should do is just, any politician should not just whip up fears amongst the public that somehow sentences have become too light or we’re exposing people to unnecessary risk.  I think the judges do nowadays impose longer sentences than any judges did in the past.  We have a huge prison population that’s too big.  That prison population should contain those people who are serious criminals and it should contain people who are a serious danger, including some of them for their natural life, but this is on individual cases.  Sorry I’m not up to speed on whatever argument of principle has apparently broken out in the Lord Chancellor’s and the Lord Chief Justice, neither of whom should actually be arguing in public in my opinion.

Boulton:  Thank you very much indeed for joining us this Sunday Live, Kenneth Clarke.