Leading Article: A government reduced to pork scratchings

A fag-end government yesterday as good as invited its supporters to open the pork barrel and lick the salt off the fattest knuckles they could find. Come and get it, said Stephen Dorrell, as he tore up the elaborate and much consulted-upon plan for acute services in north-west London, devised by his predecessor, Virginia Bottomley. He will doubtless feel that keeping a substitute accident and emergency unit open in Edgware is no great sacrifice.

Yet he knows, as all health secretaries know, that A&E is a touchstone in any rational organisation of health care in urban areas. The public often clamours for high-cost neighbourhood facilities. They cannot be afforded, and that means hard decisions have to be made that appear to favour one location over another. Mr Dorrell's predecessor made a hard decision; he has changed his mind and given no convincing reason for it.

We are therefore left to conclude the obvious: blackmail pays. Local MPs Hugh Dykes and Sir John Gorst have stretched Mr Dorrell over the selfsame pork barrel. The health secretary is left presiding over a broken-backed health policy for the capital.

Not that Hugh Dykes and Sir John Gorst have themselves done anything reprehensible. Edmund Burke may have been a Tory, but neither the Tories nor any of the other parties have ever accepted that sublimely impractical recipe for parliamentary representation set out in his address to the electors of Bristol. Burke was wrong: MPs are obliged, at least occasionally, to try and do things for their constituents. The problem is balancing when they should speak for sectional interest, when for party, and when for nation. We hear Tory MPs speak for locality and - most usually - for party. We rarely these days hear them speaking for nation.

The very phrase pork barrel provokes comparison with the United States. American vote-buying offends us - but it is peculiar to the American political culture, which depends on pork for lubrication. Getting the goods for state and district is what elected representatives are there to do: that President Clinton should lobby for Arkansas chicken exports while chatting to Boris Yeltsin in the Kremlin should not shock us. American pork barrels - and those packed with chicken, oil, tobacco, rice and cotton - are all politically functional.

Here the size of the barrel is determined by the power of MPs. They lack power. They have little direct sway over executive decisions, and are only able to strike a wee bargain here and there. Of course they can and ought to help out their constituents, by chivvying the local council or heading deputations for foreign investments, or whatever. But the opportunity with which Dykes and Gorst were presented was exceptional, and, for them, not to be passed up. Weakness and division in a government whose whips' office is in a state of terminal impotence presented them with a mile- wide opportunity.

Good for Edgware, Harrow and Hendon. But bad for Tory claims to be a party with a health policy, and fatal for Tory claims to disciplined fiscal management. And if, as the election approaches, and they pen their election addresses, we just happen to hear Mr Dykes and Sir John Gorst daring to claim they have any firm stance on the particular control of health spending, then that hypocrisy would be blatant for all too see.

More strikingly, this north London pork barrel tale is symptomatic of a wider governmental malaise. The way this government is shown, every day, at every turn, to be deeply debilitating. The development of policy is at a virtual standstill, because nothing significant can happen before the general election. Instead, we are offered old meat, for example from Gillian Shephard on selection, or from Michael Heseltine with his recycled competitiveness white paper yesterday.

Mr Clarke goes to the Mansion House. It is an occasion when he could, even if he had little new to say about macroeconomic policy, have tried his hand at explaining and analysing trends in the world economy. He might have sought to attach his name to the new pragmatism that rules in economic decision-making; he might have used his time to lecture the City about domestic investment. Any or all of that would have told us that here was a Chancellor thinking ahead.

Instead we get Mr Clarke indulging in the party dog-fight. What he had to say about the Eurosceptics is well taken, but, in a purely government sense, it is not material - it is about internal Tory divisions, which need an election before they can properly be resolved. The governance of Britain is captive to the petty squabbles of a political party whose mandate was exhausted months ago. The nation has been precipitated into potentially calamitous demarche with our fellow members of the European Union for the sake, largely, of keeping a fissiparous party together for a few sterile months longer.

This little arm-twisting episode in north London emphasises the impossibility of Mr Major's administration any longer sustaining an intellectually consistent position, for the simple reason that his premiership is now hostage to the influence of even the tiniest minority of determined MPs. Being up to your arms in pork, as the whole of Congress is in America, is one thing; living with a government that has only scratchings to offer from the bottom of its political barrel is quite another.