Articles tagged with: Labour
30 September 2008, Consultation Response to: “From public sector to public service: Putting citizens in control, A Green Paper from the Progress Policy Group on Public Service Reform”
Amongst the most striking and impressive of the sentences contained in From public sector to public service: Putting citizens in control are the following:
It is not passive consumers but active citizens who can contribute a new dimension to improving public services. What we propose is not some sort of crude pandering to consumerism. Instead we believe the principal objective of reform should be to empower the individual citizen.
My contribution to this Progress consultation will be some considerations on this statement.
The statement is defensive in that it seems to anticipate the criticisms which the authors suspect will be leveled at them. These anticipated criticisms appear, most particularly, to be concerned with an excessive reverence for market mechanisms or quasi market mechanisms. It would take a particularly jaundiced interpretation of the paper to conclude that the authors see such mechanisms as ends, rather than means. However, the most vitriolic reactions to From public sector to public service: Putting citizens in control will doubtless come from those who interpret the policy means advocated as ends themselves. Thus, the paper and the statement pitch into a recurring debate on the left. Fifty years after Eduard Bernstein first did so, Tony Crosland urged the proper distinction between ends and means. “The only ends of socialism”, argued the Crosland-ite Roy Hattersley in the 1980s, “are justice and equality. Everything else is means”.
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Saturday 20 September, Labour Party Conference Diary
Train heave on to Euston”, once sang one of Manchester’s favourite sons. My reverse journey began with a blizzard of Cabinet Ministers: Hilary Benn, suited and booted, and seemingly fretting about his ticket; John Hutton, relaxed in both dress and in his ability to emerge from a long queue at W. H. Smith’s with a newspaper in time for his train. He may have read the Mirror editorial proclaiming that Labour faces “one of the most important conferences in its proud history”. Many of the pivotal moments in Labour’s history have been forged in the fiery furnace of conference. So the journey north was charged with anticipation and occasion.
Morrissey called upon arrival in Manchester. This was Helen, my CLP Secretary, not Stephen Patrick, with a tip on navigating the secure zone. First I had to contend with a taxi journey to my B&B which was extended by “the loonies marching,” as my driver put it. I was content to take this focus group of one as the authentic voice of Manchester’s working class.
“Kill the body and the head will follow”, says old boxing wisdom. The struggles of Gordon Brown and the grumbles of all sections of the Labour Party might seem a portent of the reverse: that the blows inflicted upon Brown will not just produce his demise but expose bitter wounds within the Party. Sadly, this would not be the first time that Labour has so acquainted itself with the political canvass.
