Dear Readers, our weekly rendezvous, via this column, is drawing to a close this month. It seems fitting, therefore, to comment on our Prime Minister's verdict on his Government's most dramatic domestic intervention - its childcare strategy.
Tony Blair invoked Sure Start to inaugurate his Let's Talk initiative, his failing Government's latest device for messing about with public services, and setting his agenda for his party before his party has the temerity to set its own agenda.
That aside, his comments last week are instructive for two reasons. First, he repeated the fiction that Sure Start has failed; second, he mobilised childcare not as an issue in and for itself, but in the service of something else.
In the unscripted part of his speech he claimed that there had been a belief that it would 'lift all the boats on a rising tide'. He admits he was sceptical about this, and he implies that when Sue Start appeared to elude the hard-to-reach and most excluded children, he felt vindicated.
But Tony Blair is not an advocate of free-at-the-point-of-need universal public provision, supplemented by well-resourced outreach - the kind of commitment that would have liberated Sure Start in its quest to engage the people who are most pauperised and most estranged from public provision.
Not surprisingly, he didn't draw the logical inferences from the Sure Start experience - that the route to help is chaotic and confusing, and that provision should be subsidised and free to those who need it but can't pay for it.
Nor did he explore the implications of a massive public investment in a largely privatised landscape.
He didn't use Sure Start to enlighten the childcare debate. On the contrary, he exploited it to advance his latest ruse for rolling back the public sector.
He claimed that the hard-to-reach have multiple problems that require multiple responses. But that is exactly what Sure Start does - it convenes multiple providers to respond to parents' needs. These providers range across the private, voluntary, NGO and state sectors.
So, what on earth is the Prime Minister talking about when he counsels that the Government needs to do delivery differently - by fully utilising the voluntary sector and third sector?
My guess is that he means curtailing the investment in Sure Start and relying again on the voluntary sector to fill the space vacated by the public sector.
We need to be afraid - this is the Blair legacy.
