publicfi
nance.co.uk/features
me. Labour had ‘lost its way’, Miliband told his party when he became leader; Byrne’s job is to help it renew, and win back trust. A nationwide ‘engagement’ exercise is under way, plus a series of expert working groups led by shadow Cabinet ministers. Their fi ndings will go to the party conference this September.
Some of the groups – including Byrne’s own – will feed into a wider report on the economy, led by Balls. Not that the shadow chancellor has been doing much blue-sky thinking. He’s been too busy lobbing policies on bank bonuses, VAT on fuel and anything else he can fi nd at George Osborne.
The policy review is being directed from Byrne’s
offi ces, in the eaves of Westminster’s Portcullis House. It is rather less commodious than the accommodation he was used to at the Treasury. Deceptively spacious is how an estate agent might describe it. And with just two advisers to support him, there’s not much scope for those legendary 11-page memos he used to issue in Whitehall – stipulating when and how he wanted his cappuccinos and lunchtime soup.
‘Yes, these days I’m more likely to get them their
lunch,’ he says ruefully. Opposition has clearly come as a bit of a culture shock. In fact, for 40-year-old Byrne, it’s the fi rst time he has ever not been in offi ce. Elected to represent Hodge Hill – a very deprived, ethnically mixed Birmingham constituency – in 2004, he was pro- moted rapidly through the Labour ranks, holding the posts of immigration and Cabinet Offi ce minister before arriving at the Treasury.
‘Opposition is bad,’ he tells me. ‘You look at what’s happening to your constituents, and you can’t do much to shield them. It’s pretty soul-destroying.’ On the other hand, it makes him hungry to get back into offi ce: ‘My generation of politicians has an urgency about that.’ When Labour was defeated last May, Byrne – who is well-known for his blunt, candid style – didn’t skip a beat before drawing some pretty harsh conclusions. Labour support had ‘fallen off a cliff’, he told colleagues, especially amongst aspirational working-class families and traditional core supporters. ‘They didn’t think we had the right answers,’ he says simply. Here is the genesis of ‘the squeezed middle’, a concept he had been leading policy work on at the Treasury.
APRIL 2011 PublicFinance 27
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52