Analysis: Milk, Maggie and the media
The free milk episode reveals some fundamental truths about the government’s cutting agenda: policy matters, but what the public thinks matters most of all.
It’s extraordinary that a political row nearly four decades ago has had such a powerful impact on the government in 2010. Margaret Thatcher, then education secretary, paid the price for ending free school milk for the under-sevens with her ‘milk-snatcher’ nickname. The enduring memory of the incident is such that a future Conservative prime minister, many years later, is prepared to nip further cutbacks to free school milk in the bud – at the price of some considerable short-term political embarrassment.
Public health minister Anne Milton was doing what junior ministers do every day: thinking up ways of improving government on their own, very limited, patch. Most of the time this involves an utterly menial aspect of public life. A £50 million budget on free milk for the under-fives is far from a big deal.
Some of the money, probably, would have found its way into boosting the Healthy Start voucher. But the net impact would surely have been a reduction in spending on the issue. David Cameron sensed a vulnerability.
“As the prime minister has emphasised, protecting those most in need will always be this government’s priority,” a Downing Street spokesperson said yesterday morning. Cameron was moving quickly: the spokesperson ruled the proposed scrapping out.
It was unfortunate that, as he did so, higher education minister David Willetts was busy on television defending the policy. In the 24-hour news war of attrition, his unfortunate position is probably regarded by No 10 as an unfortunate piece of collateral damage. Willetts, to his credit, made the best of a bad job.
This was embarrassing. Don’t be fooled into thinking the government is not interested in the media, though. Former Tory health secretary Stephen Dorrell summed up the problem beautifully on the Today programme.
“This incident reveals something that’s a continuum in political or other life,” he said.
“We try and make rational decisions, but we do so against a background of recognising that human beings are not wholly rational.”
This is another way of saying that Cameron’s decision was motivated by damage limitation. He recognised the political sensitivities relating to this particular £50 million of public spending were much, much greater than the minister involved supposed. So he knocked the issue on the head.
In the short-term, in the middle of the news desert that is August, this was front page news nonetheless. Yet, politically, Cameron had made an extremely rational decision. A full-scale row has been decisively avoided.
What does this teach us about the government’s approach to cutting public spending? There are three points to make. Firstly, the Department of Health’s original plans to offset the loss of the milk funding’s removal through the Healthy Start voucher were vague in the extreme. “This was a proposal from Anne Milton suggesting this money might be better used to deliver the same objective by different means,” Dorrell suggested earlier. In fact there was no guarantee the money would simply be diverted elsewhere. Cuts remained a real possibility. The coalition can’t be trusted.
Secondly, the hypocrisy of the opposition remains insufferable. Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham wins the award for most overblown reaction. “What prompted [Cameron] to act in this bizarre way seems to have been the fear of being compared to Margaret Thatcher rather than the policy itself,” he huffed. “It is no way to conduct government business.” This is day-to-day politicking at its best; but it is painful to hear this rhetoric from ex-ministers who, until May, had participated in the cripplingly short-termist Gordon Brown government.
Thirdly, and most significantly, we’ve learned the true extent of the jitteriness afflicting No 10. Public prime ministerial interventions are not available to party leaders in unlimited supply. How many more times, in the next three months, will the public spending debate force Cameron’s hand as it did yesterday? The PM can get away with it once, or even twice; but more than that starts to look like cutting carelessness.
