Not Quite Flash, Not Quite Just, Not Quite Gordon

The Vicar of Downing Street's second most significant legacy faces a bit of a dilemma at the annual Down with Frogs, Out with Wogs Party conference in Blackpool. The problem is that he is the leader of the opposition in a country where his party's policies are already being implemented.

It is a cruel situation. Daveybloke, like New Labour, cannot put forward effective policies on climate change because the Confabulation of Business Interests wouldn't like it. Daveybloke, like New Labour, cannot put forward coherent policies on parliamentary reform because the Westminster Club would close ranks and blackball him faster than a Home Secretary drafting the whims of Murdoch into law. Daveybloke cannot oppose New Labour policy on killing Middle Easterners, because his party has supported them every inch of the blood-drenched, rectum-licking, our-boys-bolstering way. Daveybloke cannot oppose the privatisation of public transport or the National Health Service, because even if he were prepared to risk cerebral accident by doing such a thing, the result would be a haemorrhage of membership into the BNP and other such salubrious locations, while the rump of his own party would show him the real meaning of understanding a little less and condemning a little more by forming one of history's smaller, if noisier, lynch mobs. Daveybloke cannot oppose New Labour policy on Europe or the Human Rights Act, because New Labour has no interest in Europe and is probably even more eager to derogate from the Human Rights Act than Daveybloke himself. Daveybloke cannot oppose New Labour policy on immigration because the only way of getting to the right of New Labour on that issue is to kick out everyone in the country who knows how to tile a roof or fix a pipe, and many of those people are white. What is a bloke to do?

This is what Daveybloke is doing: he has pledged to stop New Labour's early release scheme for twenty-five thousand prisoners. Daveybloke cannot oppose New Labour policy on putting people in prison, but he has leapt at the opportunity to oppose letting them out, even if that means an ever more impossible job for our boys in the police and the prison service. These people are being released, you may recall, not because New Labour has suddenly developed qualms about incarcerating vast swathes of the population in places where they can learn to be more ambitious and unscrupulous criminals, but because New Labour's vast swathes of new crimes, new offences, new police powers and more macho sentencing meant that there was nowhere to put all the extra bodies. There is still nowhere to put them, but Daveybloke apparently believes he can solve this difficulty by scrapping the identity card scheme. The money saved by this minor excursion into reason is to help fund prison places, which will obviously appear instantaneously by dint of sheer market forces.

Daveybloke also intends to give "tough love" to the unemployed: anyone who declines a job offer which somebody or other thinks "reasonable" will have their benefits withdrawn, thus saving the taxpayer eight billion pounds (eight thousand million, in Oldspeak) which will be spent on contracting out the running of job centres to private businesses and voluntary groups. Such bodies are "far better" at running return-to-work schemes than civil servants, according to Daveybloke, whose acquaintance with the workings of Metronet, Railtrack and the Private Finance Initiative is obviously not the most extensive. Instead, he is relying on the findings of a "social justice group" chaired by Iain Duncan Smith; which may or may not be as tough or as loving as a sojourn on public transport or in a PFI hospital.