Political audit: keeping score

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/09/political-audit-keeping-score-editorial

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Audits by auditors with an interest in the outcome are not to be taken too seriously. The small print of the score sheet of its own achievements which the government published on Wednesday might reasonably be taken with a large dose of scepticism, interesting mainly because there had been an offstage dispute about whether the results would be too embarrassing to publish at all.

All this mood music about measured outcomes might be taken to suggest that government by target is a continuing project whose success can be calibrated in ticked boxes and the language of pledges fulfilled. But, as Tony Blair discovered early on in his first term, describing the journey of government tends to get in the way of reaching the destination. It is no surprise to discover that potential embarrassments (debt, what debt?) of the mid-term review are buried under ornate but vague depictions of activities, for this is a document whose real purpose is political rather than administrative, a good deal less about measuring progress against pledge, than it is about explaining why the coalition should continue to exist. Its origins, after all, lie in the premature death of plans for a coalition agreement mark II, which proved too difficult after two and a half bruising years of hard choices and disappointed ambitions.

On the face of it, it is a description of what the business of coalition has delivered. But what it is meant to do is persuade the reluctant that it is worth persevering with the coalition through increasingly turbulent times to the next election, even though the founding purpose of dealing with the deficit has failed to produce the anticipated results. Consequently, it says much more about the journey than it does about the destination.

Audit is only ever as good as the questions that are asked. For a sense of where the government is actually headed, see instead another newly published review of its activity, more revealing than anything in the 120 pages of the mid-term review. Written by critical friends on the Academies Commission, chaired by the former inspector of schools Christine Gilbert, it reports on the impact of the explosion in the numbers of schools that have opted out of local education authority oversight from just over 200 academies in 2010 to more than 2400 now. On the face of it this is another notch in the belt of Michael Gove, the Tory activists' favourite minister. But this serious, careful piece of work warns that rolling back the state does not on its own guarantee results. More worryingly, it hints at weaknesses in access and accountability that are precisely what LEA control would once have provided. Academy expansion and academic improvement are not the same thing, the report suggests, and nor can it be taken for granted that the substitution of some taxpayers' money with private sponsorship will produce better schools.

The processes of coalition are being closely scrutinised by academics and political anoraks, fuelled by the thought that in hard times with no easy answers, they are studying the model of the future. The etiquette of the relationship between political leaders, devices for reinforcing partnership, and the benefits to public debate of legitimised dissent are relentlessly (and informatively) anatomised. Much less examined, so far, is the impact of the constraints of sharing power on the politics of the parties that are sharing it. Last year's angry critique from many Tory backbenchers of betrayal and retreat, amplified on the web and reinforced by the mood in their constituencies, is making heroes of the ministers who are boldest in pursuing what they see as a real Conservative agenda. To Michael Gove, add Jeremy Hunt and maybe Theresa May as potential alternatives to a defeated Cameron. These are politicians preparing their job applications, politicians who spend much less of their day fretting over meeting the points of the coalition agreement than they do presenting their policies as authentically Conservative. In the context of real politics, that's the tally that is going to count.