Steve Richards: Brown may preach the end of spin, but he's determined to dominate the media agenda

He faced a dilemma: how to signal change without alienating the devotees of Tony Blair?

Published: 12 July 2007

Gordon Brown entered Downing Street proclaiming with a flourish that the work of change would begin. He did not say what form the proclaimed change would take.

Yet after a fortnight of hyperactivity, including two prime ministerial statements in the Commons, the answer is very clear. From the scrapping of Tony Blair's supercasinos to constitutional reform, Brown has marked out the path he will take up until the next general election.

Brown faced a dilemma as he strode into Downing Street two weeks ago. How to signal change without alienating the devotees of Tony Blair who had preached the need for continuity? In the vaguest of ways, this had also become a pivotal test in parts of the media as well. Some powerful newspapers wondered whether Brown would continue with Blair's domestic "reforms" and foreign policy or "go backwards" to revive a favoured meaningless metaphor?

Brown had another challenge too. There were no obvious big changes he could make to demonstrate a break with the past. A sudden troop withdrawal from Iraq would not have ended the nightmare and could have made matters worse. Such a move might have attracted good headlines for a day or two, but any fleeting euphoria would have been countered soon enough by the next mass murder in Iraq. On the domestic front, Brown inherited a perverse situation where the Conservatives were ahead in the polls on the NHS without any firm policies of their own. But there was no wand to wave that would immediately bring about a brave new world, nor was it straightforward to disentangle the reforms rushed through by Blair.

Brown entered Downing Street proclaiming change, but lacking the equivalent of the poll tax. Nor did he want the changes to be so sweeping that he would feed the Tory narrative about his leadership being a lurch to the left.

So how has he sought to be the reassuring radical, a change maker who would not alarm many voters?

Here is a list of some of the changes announced or implied since Brown took over. Evidently the plans for a supercasino in Manchester are to be scrapped. Some constitutional reforms will be implemented. There is a new focus on standards in classrooms, with a subtle change in emphasis for the Blairite academies.

Here is the new Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, in the Commons earlier this week: "The test of whether an organisation can be a potential sponsor should not be its bank balance but whether it can demonstrate leadership , commitment and innovation in the public interest." Balls looks to more universities for sponsorship and stresses the importance of academies being rooted in local communities. Brown and his close allies are more interested in lines of accountability compared with Blair.

None of the changes announced so far have drastic spending implications. More widely, Brown has attempted to construct a big tent, with business leaders and others being brought into the Government.

The changes have common characteristics. At this stage they are relatively small and cautious, but point in potentially more radical directions. They have a moral dimension that transcends traditional left-right boundaries. The Daily Mail, for example, was the fiercest opponent of the supercasinos, but this was a policy that also horrified some Blairites who worked in No 10 when it was originally announced.

Overall, the changes signal specific dividing lines with the Tories, but ones that are not raging in their contentiousness. Some of the changes are so incremental they have been announced many times before, as David Cameron pointed out while he mocked the draft Queen's Speech.

In other words, Brown is adopting the New Labour approach in the build-up to the 1997 election when it sought for the first time to build a big coalition of support. A decade ago Labour hailed incremental policies that were cautious and yet signalled radical possibilities while working with other parties and business leaders. In his Commons statement yesterday, Gordon Brown revived some of the language from that era too. He wanted "opportunities for all" and affordable housing for the many and not just the few. I wondered whether Prudence might pay a fresh visit, the star of his early years as chancellor. As it turned out, she did not get a look in and will probably have to wait for the next Budget before enjoying a revival. Still, Prudence apart, this is a recognisably New Labour strategy from the 1990s.

For a time, it was perversely fashionable in some quarters to question whether Brown was really New Labour at all. As far as the concept has clear definition, Brown is more New Labour than Blair. During the early years of New Labour, Brown was at least as influential as Blair. Then in the Government's second term Blair became more assertive and chose to take his party on a different path, more overtly Thatcherite in domestic policy and neo-conservative in its foreign policies. Now Brown moves cautiously from Thatcherite Labour back to New Labour, an entity that is still very different from so-called Old Labour.

Even the much-vaunted stylistic changes echo the early years of New Labour. Forget all this hype about the end of spin. When Brown and his closest advisers are trapped in their first media frenzy I doubt if the first words uttered by any of them will be: "Whatever we do we must tell Parliament first."

Brown will try to dominate the media agenda as Blair managed to do in the early years. His statement yesterday previewing this autumn's Queen's Speech was one example of a new attempt to do so. The move reminded me of an earlier Brownite innovation, the pre-Budget report. In effect the pre-Budget report was a grand title for Mr Brown's attempt to control and dominate the agenda between the annual budgets. The new Prime Minister remains as interested as anyone in the politics of presentation.

In terms of Brown's famous dividing lines, another early New Labour device, the Conservatives will need to tread carefully. A tax break for married couples, calls for a referendum on Europe and support for more Blairite reforms while railing against the consequences of those reforms in the NHS suggests Cameron's desire to modernise his party has its strict limits.

They are so strict that there is a twist. Not so long ago, Cameron was widely attacked, or hailed, depending on your point of view, for emulating the New Labour project of the mid 1990s. Apparently the Tory leader and his advisers took various New Labour manuals with them wherever they went, taking notes and learning chapters off by heart. They may well have done, but for good or bad the leader who is returning to the New Labour project of the mid -1990s is not Cameron. It is Brown.

s.richards@ independent.co.uk

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