Gordon Brown faces backwards

A nice article in today's Telegraph by Michael Gove (now minus spectacles), do take a read but here is an extract "The great unwritten story of the Brown Government is the intellectual exhaustion at its heart. Central to what Brown calls his vision are three things - rhetoric about aspiration linked to housing, an emphasis on education as a route to greater opportunity, and a promise to strengthen Britishness as an identity that underpins our security. Yet in the past week his Government has disappointed in each area. Because its approach, far from being genuinely visionary or far-sighted, is shaped by an outdated bureaucratic mindset.

On housing, the Government introduced a new Planning Bill on Monday with the aim of helping first-time buyers enter a difficult market. But instead of reforming the planning system to allow local communities to promote house-building, the central thrust of the bill is the creation of a new bureaucratic monster, a super-quango, that will provide another layer of complexity within an already over-complex and over-centralised system.

One of the principal reasons the housing market in Britain has become so dysfunctional is the centralised nature of the planning system, which hasn't delivered homes where they're wanted. Instead of a fresh vision all we have is more intervention.

The same bureaucratic mindset is apparent in the Government's approach to education. Ten years of government micro-management have resulted in our schools plummeting down the international league table for numeracy, literacy and science. But the Government's response, the Children's Plan that was unveiled this week, takes micro-management to a whole new level of intrusiveness, with more than 500 targets for the education of toddlers and rules on how babies should play with rusks."