PREZZA - BALLAST OR BLUFFER?

28-08-2007

Labour MP Stephen Pound has described John Prescott as the "ballast" of the party during the Blair years. Which can surely only be an unflattering reference to Prezza's waistline.

Now that Prescott has announced he's stepping down as an MP, let's assess his record, shall we?

When Labour came to power in 97, he was appointed Deputy Prime Minister, but this only amounted to a position of significance in his own puffed-up imagination.

There was use of an official residence, Dorneywood - which came in handy for shagging his mistress - but mostly being DPM simply meant he provided light entertainment for the parliamentary sketch writers while Blair was on holiday.

At the despatch box and elsewhere, Prescott was the master of the malprop - including his classic line: "The Green Belt is a Labour achievement, and we mean to build on it."

Yet for all that, he was a powerful Secretary of State in the newly amalgamated Department for Environment, Transport and the Regions and led the revolt against the Tories "predict and provide" roads program. It was like Swampy was King For A Day.

But only for a day. After the party came the hangover as the stale air of disappointment hung over the entire New Labour project - but especially when it came to transport, the environment and the regions.

Yes, money was invested in the railways, but too much of it lined the pockets of the private rail companies' shareholders. Passenger numbers rose, but so too did fares, while customer satisfaction headed in the other direction.

There were real improvements in the infrastructure, not least on the West Coast Main Line, but these were too slow and costly to amount to much more than marking time. Birmingham still waits, a decade on, for a new New Street station.

Meantime the real issue of challenging the botched privatisation of Railtrack was ducked until after a series of tragedies finally made it unavoidable.

The failure of Prescott's rail regime could be measured by the fact that many of the Conservatives' once reviled road schemes were taken off the shelf, dusted down, and put into practice anyway.

That's not to say that New Labour didn't care about the environment. Prezza always liked to argue that he was the architect of the world's first international agreement to combat climate change - the Kyoto Treaty.

It was just a pity that our "special relationship" couldn't persuade the US - the world's number one polluter - to sign up. Kyoto may have been a noble failure, but it was a failure nonetheless.

If his record on the environment was underwhelming, Prescott's other big project of English devolution was a disaster.

Plans for a regional assemblies - including one in the West Midlands - were ditched after being rejected in the North Eastby voters who sussed they were being given another talking shop instead of real local government.

Shame. Expensive, bloated, and full of empty rhetoric they would have stood as the perfect symbol of Prezza's wasted decade.

Ballast? No. Bluffer? Yes.