Blairism is in the ascendant. The departmental five-year plans rolling off the government's presses are all impeccably on-message. The latest—from the Department for Work and Pensions-is not a page-turner, but the men at Number 10 think it a fine work, for it offers further proof that the prime minister has succeeded in wresting control of the domestic agenda from Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, in the past year. The DWP has traditionally been a fiefdom of the Treasury. But since the departure in September of Andrew Smith, one of the chancellor's most faithful acolytes, it is no longer under Mr Brown's sole authority. The department is now being run by Alan Johnson, the quiet, skilful former higher education minister who successfully steered Mr Blair's policy of raising tuition fees for university students past bitter Labour Party opposition. But the determination to tackle Britain's pensions mess and change the incapacity benefit rules comes directly from Number 10. All sorts of Blairite ideas, linked by the common theme of making public services more responsive to individual needs by extending competition through quasi-markets, will pack the Labour Party's election manifesto.
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