Self-Service

The Lower Miliband has given a brilliant demonstration of the splendid incoherence which New New Labour ministers can attain when forced to talk about something other than killing foreigners or punishing poor people. The Lower Miliband was discussing public services - a nasty, spiky, left-wing topic, of the kind that is nowadays best dealt with by churches, charities and Daveybloke in his cuddlier moments. The Lower Miliband commenced with an attack on those members of the public who just sit at home waiting for public services to do something for them: "We have to get away from the notion of 'letterbox' public services - of sitting in your house waiting for public services to be delivered. ... What we all know about public services is that their success or failure isn't just dependent on what is delivered to the person - it depends on the engagement of the person." The last thing we should expect of public services is that they should go around providing services to the public. If you want your bin emptied, your children educated or your sewage drained, you had dashed well better be prepared to take the responsibility yourself. "The big challenge for the future is how we can engage people themselves in the success of the service", and the Lower Miliband made it clear that a "roll bank state", whatever that may be, is not the answer. The answer is something called "soft accountability", which sounds rather like the kind of accountability that doesn't actually require anyone to take responsibility for anything: it could, for example, "take the form of the public meeting their local police once a month at a 'beat meeting'" so that the police, like any other corporation, could advertise what a wonderful job they're doing. "The second challenge we face is how do we unlock the capacity of the individual themselves" - no more of that "flush and forget" attitude to drainage; no more spending of taxpayers' money on things that ordinary people should be having meetings about. This will result in a more personalised type of public service, which will presumably be appropriately targeted at those who can afford it; the notion of a "universal" public service, as the Lower Miliband observes, may have been fashionable ten years ago but simply "doesn't happen in any way anymore". This, like the state of our parliament, police force, army, railways, national health service, education system, Olympic preparations and, no doubt, sewers, is a sign of New Labour's "progress and success".