Choicing Trade-Offs, Trialling Tranches

New Labour has decided to eschew "the old way of trialling policies on focus groups", which might sound even better than it does if trial were a verb, and to invite "a tranche of the electorate into Downing Street" and explore some views. Rather than an old-fashioned focus group, in which a group of people are asked to focus on a certain matter, a group of sixty people will be asked to focus on "three underlying questions in the policy review". The results will not be "prescriptive traditional manifesto commitments for Mr Blair's successor" - you can leave the legacy business to Tony - but will instead "set out the underlying dilemmas that will confront all future governments".

The underlying dilemmas include "league tables ... about customer satisfaction for schools, hospitals and local authorities"; requesting "frank reports" in which citizens will denounce local services; "incentives to encourage recycling"; and "encouraging neighbourhoods to come up with ideas to make their communities healthier". The aim, according to his reverence, is "to put citizens in the position of ministers and civil servants in facing the difficult and at times conflicting challenges which they face"; in other words, the point of the exercise is not to allow citizens the opportunity to inform the government of their wishes, as might be the case in some second-rate, gimcrack democracy, but to impress upon an ungrateful electorate what a hard lonely life it is at the top. His reverence observed that too many people believe the Government acts "for completely perverse reasons, just trying to make a hash of things for the sake of it". There is, his reverence thinks, almost a tendency at times for the public debate to go this way, and certainly the media debate, at times, he thinks, tends to do so. His reverence believes that "in reality, if the public were taken through making choices they would realise the trade-offs".

You see, to every policy decision there are advantages for some and disadvantages for others. The public has not thought of this. There is a trade-off, for example, in standing shoulder to shoulder with George W Bush while his forces turn a crisis into a catastrophe. Just think what might have happened if Tony had gone and listened to the crude, unthinking public on that one. There is a trade-off between the interests of the unthinking, nagging public - always yelling for more health care, more public transport, more pensions, just because they pay taxes - and the interests of real people like the nice men who are trying to make an honest penny from PFI hospitals, railway consumers, superannuation enhancement initiatives, City bonuses, missile defence shields, and the Olympics. There is, above all, a trade-off between what the nagging, ignorant, apathetic public wants, and what Tony knows is best. One day, perhaps, we will all appreciate that.