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By Stein Ringen
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Brown’s problem. We can also dismiss explanations that go to a lack of will. New Labour hardly promised a Scandinavian-type welfare state, but it had made social justice the purpose of its economic policy. Nor is incompetence a persuasive explanation. It is true that Mr. Brown failed to understand that artificial growth generated by hot air in the financial services industry was a bubble, but so did almost everyone else. Otherwise, he was on top of the budget. The New Labour team was suspicious of and cautious with power.
A strongly centralised structure of governance—presidential without checks and balances according to Mr. Marshall-Andrews—puts too much power of decision making in the hands of too few people and denies those lone decision makers necessary protections against the intrinsic tendency for things to go wrong. Too much power is a recipe for mistaken policies. It makes it too easy for too few people to decide too much. It deprives those decision makers of the caution that comes with the awareness that their decisions will be checked and double-checked and scrutinised by others with independent authority.
It was not necessary to be radical, just a touch more generosity at one end and a touch more determination at the other end. On child poverty, it underestimated the amount of spending needed and overestimated the effectiveness of targeted policies. Most of its new money came from reallocations within the social security budget. Targeted transfers are usually too complicated to be effective, and were certainly so in this case. 10 On criminal justice, the government overestimated the effectiveness of reactive control and underestimated the need for preventive measures.