Does Norman Warner’s resignation of the Labour whip over his party’s Corbynite relapse matter much? Yes or no? Before I tell you who Lord Warner is, I think I should answer: “A bit of both.”
Mostly no in a busy week when steel manufacturing jobs are being lost to our Chinese VIP guest’s dumping practices and other bits of scenery are falling over. It’s more symptomatic than significant in itself: Warner has never stood for election, always an important detail in a CV.
He’s also 75, much older than that other can-do technocrat who got into the lifeboat and rowed away from the SS Corbyn the other day. At 52, Lord Adonis, who is going to run the government’s infrastructure commission, is a mere boy, full of energy and ambition. Warner is approaching his best before date.
That is not to denigrate the noble lord, who has had an interesting career and is a thoughtful, experienced public official. What’s more, there is a lot in last night’s Dear Jeremy ... resignation letter with which plenty of voters – including me – find it hard to disagree.
Explaining that he won’t be joining any other party but will spend his membership subs and other donations “on progressive causes”, Warner adds: “I have watched for some time the declining quality of the Labour party’s leadership but had not expected the calamitous decline achieved in 2015. The Labour party is no longer a credible party of government in waiting, to slightly adapt Donald Dewar’s phrase. The approach of those around you and your own approach and policies is highly likely to worsen the decline in the Labour party’s credibility. I fear for the party’s future if your supporting activists secure ever greater control of the party’s apparatus and processes; and the role of the parliamentary Labour party diminishes further in the selection of a leader and the formulation of policies likely to win an election.”
That is old people’s “going to the dogs” talk, so it’s no surprise I agree with it, having seen the Corbyn movie before in the 80s. No surprise either that Warner goes on to quote the lately deceased Denis Healey, who first stood for the Labour leadership in an exceptional field in 1976.
“There are far too many people who want to luxuriate complacently in moral righteousness in opposition ... We are not just a debating society. We are not just a socialist sunday school. We are a great movement that wants to help real people living on this earth at the present time. We shall never be able to help them unless we get power. We shall never get power unless we close the gap between our active workers and the average voter in the country.”
Quite so to most of that too, though it will be hotly contested by decent people who would never dream of reading the Daily Mail and therefore don’t understand why more decent people don’t vote Labour because it does not adequately address their hopes and fears.
In fairness, I should add that a prominent Blairite moderniser, who is not planning to do a Warner and leave in despair, took me to task for over-generosity in my recent Healey obit. At critical moments between 1974 and 1981, he did not stand up to the Bennites. Cowardice, he said.
Alas, he’s probably right, but Healey did not quit either and became the first major figure to say “it has to be Blair” on TV within hours of John Smith’s fatal heart attack in 1994. Denis later went off Blair and became a Brown supporter; he was inconsistent, but always cheerful with it.
Back to Warner. Who is he? Sorry to keep you waiting. He’s a career civil servant whose path took a fatal turn in 1974 when the new social services secretary, Barbara Castle, hired an obscure councillor/lawyer called Jack Straw to work as a special adviser (she admired his “low cunning”) with Warner in her Whitehall private office.
In 1976, Straw and Warner put together a file for the then prime minister, Harold Wilson, confirming suspicions about the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe’s (these Jeremys, eh!) predatory sex life, which stopped Wilson defending him from accusers. Thorpe resigned. Since the details came from the social security file of his boyfriend, Norman Scott (“grotesque” that it should have been there, Straw says in his memoirs), it must have been a bonding experience. Except they had already bonded: back in 1974, it was Warner who first introduced Straw to Alice Perkins, a high-flying young official who became his wife. Jack wrote that he was immediately attracted to Alice’s Euroscepticism. Love takes strange paths.
Fast forward to 1998 and Straw, by now the home secretary, appoints Warner his special policy adviser with a peerage thrown in. In the interval he had left Whitehall to become a social services director in Kent, later running family services in east London, chairing an inquiry into how to improve the management of children’s homes.
Proper stuff and Warner later became a junior health minister from 2003 to 2007 when Gordon Brown did some spring cleaning. Since then, he has been chairing the coalition’s commission on social care funding (old folk who need help), a tricky brief. He’s now got a portfolio of unpaid and paid committees and quangos, public and private.
He’s also an active peer and respected in the Lords, as Patrick Wintour writes in today’s Guardian. What’s got him into hot water lately, and allows Labour’s current work and pensions spokesman, Owen Smith, to dismiss him as halfway out of the party “for quite a while”, are his views on shaking up the NHS.
In April 2013, Warner was the only Labour peer to vote with the coalition against an opposition effort to rewrite a regulation on opening up NHS contracts to private or third sector providers. Earlier, he was the only one not to vote against the principle of the Lansley health and social care bill.
He set out his reasoning here and, as a contributor to the Health Service Journal for many years, I have some sympathy with his position. It was Andy Burnham who retreated from stances he took as Brown’s health secretary, so that when he complained about “NHS privatisation” after 2010, Tory ministers could reply: “We’re using Labour legislation.”
Decent man though he is, it didn’t do Burnham’s leadership hopes much good and it isn’t “privatisation” anyway. The NHS has had private contractors since day one in 1948: we call them GPs. And healthcare in the UK needs greater diversity and decentralisation of provision, which is what is now happening. Widespread experimentation – at least it is in England.
Funding is something else and Warner made a fool of himself when he urged a £10 a month fee to use the NHS, this under the umbrella of the Reform thinktank, more Tory than it admits. He’s right to say the NHS is short of money because demand is rising (all those oldies like himself, all those newcomers) and cash is tighter than the Other Jeremy pretends, but user charges would only penalise the poorest. As such, it intensifies what the trade calls “the inverse care law”: those who need it most get least and vice versa.
I last stumbled on Warner’s tracks when George Osborne unexpectedly devolved healthcare to Greater Manchester’s 10 local authorities and myriad health boards: a £6bn budget. Warner and his business partner Jack O’Sullivan had been working locally on integrated health and care schemes in what the pair call Lancashire’s “healthopolis”. They wrote about it here (paywall). Ed Balls was cross, but Manchester’s highly successful Labour civic leaders told him they know what they are doing.
Here’s hoping. It’s tricky stuff, especially when deficits are being devolved too, along with potential blame. But it’s worth a go and others have followed Manchester’s lead. So Warner shows himself a maverick figure, not afraid to take unpopular stances for things he believes in, based on coalface experience in social care. At 75, there’s less need to be polite.
That’s probably why he’s chucked his hand in with Labour and why the Corbynistas won’t be wearing black armbands. They think the never elected Warner has got it wrong and he thinks they have done the same. We’ll see who is right. Steve Bassam, Labour’s crafty chief whip in the Lords, will have seen it coming and regret that it has happened.
So will colleagues who share many of Warner’s doubts, but think it’s best to dig in and fight their corner against what long experience has taught the former MPs among them is likely to be an election-losing strategy.
It’s a judgment call. Warner (like Adonis) is someone who “likes to get things done” and lacks deep tribal loyalty, the sort of person who supports Manchester United but is happy to see the city’s other team win or wants Scotland to prevail when England falters in the #RWC. Hard though it is for some to accept, such people do exist.
