Hey Matthew, why are you so hung up about government waste? You’re always banging on about it, but surely most of us accept that a few billion here and there are needed to lubricate the system?
Of course I really mean, ‘why doesn’t anyone else seem to care?’ Isn’t it one of the main jobs of opposition to fight this ever-increasing bonfire of taxpayers’ money? If you and your various bumper-books are even half-right, then there’s a big juicy target for the Conservative Party simultaneously to gain popularity and carry out their moral responsibility.
But they ignore that target by promising to match Labour’s spending plans. Why? Either they must think that the amount wasted is insignificant, or that making a noise about it won’t win them popularity. I suspect it’s the second. They presumably believe that government spending is associated in people’s minds with the provision of public services, and that people are ‘realistic’ about the inevitability of some significant degree of waste in any system. Therefore banging on about government waste means identifying yourself as a cutter of public services.
If that’s what they believe, I think they’re right. Conservative campaigning on government waste is counter-productive. Unless, that is, Conservatives also campaign on reform of public services. Without reform, you can’t cut waste, and therefore to maintain services you must match Labour’s spending plans.
But campaigning on reform of public services – so goes the thinking, I suspect - is also tantamount to attacking public services. Therefore forget the whole subject.
So what we also need, Matthew, is ‘the bumper book of improving public services through reform’. Why is that almost impossible to imagine? I was around in 1979 when the election campaign included the image of runners on a racing track with great weights around their necks; the simple message was that the burden of the state was slowing them down. The message worked. People knew that it was not only time for a change of personnel, but also a change of thinking.
Are we trying hard enough to create a change of thinking now? Or have we abandoned that as a role for politics?
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