I HAVE a wide circle of friends, and one I met the other day was just back from a visit to the Chancellor of the Exchequer's summer palace at North Queensferry.

While there they reminisced about the good times when we were all whooping it up in the Edinburgh of the 1970s, and even I used to go to Gordon's Hogmanay parties in Marchmont Road, to dance with Princess Margaret of Romania under his

benign gaze.

At this reunion a question arose that occurs to many who knew the young Brown then. He was doing his doctoral thesis on Jimmy Maxton. He edited The Red Paper on Scotland with an introduction ending: ''The Scottish Labour movement is uniquely placed today to convert the present discontent into a demand for socialism: we will fail only if we ignore the challenge.''

With these antecedents, what does the Chancellor really, really think now? The answer seems to be that he has undergone some kind of genuine conversion, and that the demand for socialism has given way in his mind to what he likes to call the work ethic.

It is a suitably Calvinist concept which may owe something yet to his youthful ideals, but obviously has a huge admixture of capitalism, globalisation, etc, forced on Labour by the instructive process of losing.

What a shame I am unlikely to get to North Queensferry anytime soon, because I would like to move the questioning on from why Gordon is no longer juvenile. A more pertinent point is whether, despite his conversion, he still thinks the Government can create jobs.

Our mutual friend believed the Chancellor wants at the macro-level only to give other people the chance to create jobs, as in the programme of welfare-to-work (though that seems to me bound either to throw money away on people who will get jobs in any event from economic expansion or throw money away on people who will lose jobs in any event from economic contraction). And if so, how do you reconcile the work ethic with

the direct labour organisation of

North Lanarkshire?

Ah, but that is a matter of the micro-level, said our mutual friend, where in Scotland the priority is to fend off the threat from the Nats (for which read: maintain the corruption by which the country is made safer for Labour).

Unhappily, many governments have tried to say one thing and do another, to pursue opposite policies at macro-level and micro-level, to keep their noses in the air and well away from

the sight or smell of the muck through which they are in fact wading. They tend to land up in the muck, on

their backsides.

These are often the governments which do not know what they think, because they have pretended to adopt principles they do not believe in. I am sure the present Government is one of them. This is why it is finding so very hard the fulfilment even of such modest electoral promises as it made.

Let me give two examples especially salient because they were printed on Labour's plastic card just so we could check up on whether performance matched promise. As a matter of fact there is after a year no sign of waiting lists in the hospitals or of classes in the schools being cut. Now, so we hear, Brown is to raid the oil companies for money to remedy

the failing.

The badness of the idea is a token of his desperation. It begs the question first of all whether simply spending money is the right way to deal with these problems when the whole system may be wrong. As much money as anyone could wish was poured into the direct labour organisation of North Lanarkshire. Did this give the district's hapless citizens the services they deserved? It just went doon the syver, as the plumber on #54,000 a year might say.

The same is happening on a much larger scale in the National Health Service. The Government has published White Papers in Scotland and England making the ludicrous claim that all will be well with a bit of saving on red tape and the number of managers. Yet even the Conservatives' increase of 72% in real terms in expenditure on the NHS between 1979 and 1997 could not keep pace with rising demands.

Sooner or later we just have to rethink the NHS and what we expect it to do, or rather what we will pay it to do. The Tories had several shots at this, and never got things quite right: it is in all conscience not an easy task. Labour has simply reversed those reforms and hoped the basic problem will go away. It will not. No wonder waiting lists are rising.

In the schools the sands into which the waters of public expenditure might seep are yet deeper. Here we have not just one but two systemic problems, and neither really concerns the size of classes. State education got its best results in the two decades after the war when, because of the baby boom, classes were at their largest. But teachers taught children to read and write in those days, rather than keeping them politically correct through multicultural interaction.

In any event, it is not central but local government that runs education. Even when central government gives money, local government can spend the money as it wants. Since central government is now taking money away, the case scarcely arises. The point holds, however, that much money can be spent without getting any results. No wonder the size of classes is rising.

So when I ask what the Chancellor and the Government really, really think, I might concede that their aims are high. But without a consistent set of ideas and methods to fulfil their aims they will fall short of them. Dare I call it ideology? In any case, I am sure guff and spin are no substitute for it.