We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

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Nurse! Nurse!

I suggest that you read this before you sit down to eat breakfast and not afterwards, lest you spend the rest of your morning mopping semi-digested coco-pops off the kitchen floor. Here are a few tasters:

I’m in tune with the ‘I can’ generation

Wow! Is that anything like the Pepsi Generation? Like, totally kewwwwllll. Not to mention hot, hip, happening, in the groove and sexeeeeeee.

That is why social and economic change today require government leadership and profes sional innovation, as well as mass mobilisation.

Certainly, sir. Corporal Tremayne reporting for duty, sir (salutes).

In public services, an “I can” service will continually ask: how can we devolve power, funding and control to the lowest appropriate level, while maintaining high national minimum standards? Can teachers and children inject more creativity into what is learnt, where and how?

Well, ‘I can’ tell him what the ‘lowest appropriate level’ is for funding and power.

This is not a zero-sum game between government power and citizen power; it is a genuine partnership that breaks down the divide between producer and consumer.

Eh?

It doesn’t get any better than that. This man has penned a whole mainstream editorial vision every single syllable of which is complete bollocks. I have to ask myself whether he actually believes this horse-manure or is he just saying these things because he thinks that this is what the public wants to hear? What world does he see through his eyes? Does he actually see hordes of shiny, happy, clappy ‘I can’ people exalting at his feet and begging him to lead them to the Promised Environment? Is he so twisted by lies that he can open wine bottles with his fingers or he is so spaced-out on his own propoganda that he has drifted hopelessly away from anything that could reasonably be described as the real world?

Perhaps one of you ‘I can’ types out there can tell me.

29 comments to Nurse! Nurse!

  • nick g.

    Under Cromwell, Britain indulged in Iconoclasm. Seems like Icanoclasm is what you need now! (And a good dose of smelling salts)

  • Johnathan Pearce

    What a patronising little squirt Milliband is. His brother is equally obnoxious.

  • Julian Taylor

    I think someone at the Daily Telegraph forgot to put “This is a Labour Party Leadership Article on behalf of Mr David Milliband MP” before the beginning. If Mr Milliband really wants to take on Cameron (and I wish someone would!) he should start by cycling to work, do his OWN blog and put up a bigger windmill on his house. Only then will we all see that he is indeed as contemptuous of the electorate as David Cameron and has all the moral depth of a puddle of warm urine.

  • Mr Miliband writes:

    The era of “I can” is the culmination of the long decline of deference and automatic authority. It is the late flowering of individual autonomy and control. It is, in other words, one of the founding ideas of left-of-centre politics: to put power in the hands of the people. In the “I can” era, people want to be players, not just spectators.

    So I invite him and his party to immediately put in place, my suggestion that total government expenditure (as a proportion of GDP) should be set annually by vote of the electorate.

    Of course, he will not view this a quite what he meant by power in the hands of the people: funny that.

    Best regards

  • Dan Badham

    His brother is equally obnoxious.

    Dad must have good strong genes as he is a real prick as well.

    I CAN Vs iDave. In a battle of identical ideas the only weapons available are image and language. They both look like ***** and both are willing to take the same photo ops, whats left? Language.

  • D Anghelone

    I can, therefore I jar.

  • The era of icahn sounds great to me.

  • steve

    I am of the I can generation: I can avoid voting Labour.

  • RobtE

    Compare and contrast –

    Milliband: I can

    The Enlightenment: I. Kant

  • Jack Olson

    I’ll just focus on one aspect of Miliband’s “I can” society, his comment that within ten years all new homes will need to sell power to the national grid. In the first place, that sounds like the “I need” which according to him is soooo last century. Moreover, the current (no pun intended) price of a 4.5 kilowatt photovoltaic system which can be connected to a power grid is US$32,000. It will produce its peak 4.5 kilowatts only under ideal conditions and obviously produce no power at all after dark. If the homeowner is to receive a price per kilowatt hour which covers his expense, he will obviously need (oops, that word again) to get a very high rate per kwh.

  • Jack Olson

    I’ll just focus on one aspect of Miliband’s “I can” society, his comment that within ten years all new homes will need to sell power to the national grid. In the first place, that sounds like the “I need” which according to him is soooo last century. Moreover, the current (no pun intended) price of a 4.5 kilowatt photovoltaic system which can be connected to a power grid is US$32,000. It will produce its peak 4.5 kilowatts only under ideal conditions and obviously produce no power at all after dark. If the homeowner is to receive a price per kilowatt hour which covers his expense, he will obviously need (oops, that word again) to get a very high rate per kwh.

  • Nick M

    Nikola Tesla is developing a rotational magnetic field in his grave. Has the Millipede ever heard of the battle of the currents? We want fission and we want it now!

    I despise Millibland more than words can possibly express.

    He ought to be chained to iDave and we can then see who gnaws the others foot off first to escape.

  • veryretired

    To address your question, TT, yes, he believes all this stuff to the nth degree.

    Oh, the language may be carefully selected so he doesn’t say anything too shocking or blatant, but when you sift through all the political doubletalk, all that’s really left is—the government must run everything, and the citizen has to help.

    We have been “salami-sliced” out of a great deal of our natural freedoms by well meaning true believers just like this guy, all concerned and dedicated, only wanting to help make this a better world for everyone.

    As long as they get to call the shots, that is.

    After all, that’s the definition of a “better world”, isn’t it?

  • Milliband is worthy of the United States Senate. He belongs over here with John Kerry and Ted Kennedy. Naturally, he could join Joe Biden who appropriated Kinnocks’ autobiography and sing a few Welsh hymns to socialism.

    What a fool I was. I used to believe that Parliamentary debate actually sharpened a politicians ability to communicate clearly.

  • “Put power in the hands of” (individual people).
    Aw, thanks Dave! We couldn’t have done it without you.
    Now, how much do we owe you?
    Oh. You’ll let us know. Right.

  • “I can” must be combined with a sense of “we can” – the belief that there is a shared willingness within each community that individuals’ actions will be reciprocated by others.,

    Isn’t that free-market capitalism? Isn’t it socialism that is based on the idea that people will not reciprocate unless threatened with government force?

  • Paul Marks

    Indeed, civil society is just that. People engaged in civil (voluntary) interaction. This can be for money profit – but it may have nothing to do with money profit.

    Government (on the other hand) is about the threat of violence. It is the “Sword of State”, most people believe that government is needed (although I hope most people would agree that government is much too big today), but to pretend that government is of can be nice (and so on) is silly.

    Our present rulers seem to honestly believe that government can work as “part of the community” and do lots of nice fluffy things for people – as long as government employees (and the people they deal with) have the “correct” ideas and attitudes, and use silly language (such as the language the post cites) and jump about in various ways.

    It is the fact that they honestly believe this that is scary.

    A government that is trying to “help people” tends to be far worse than a government that just collects its taxes (to defend itself and the nation it rules) and is indifferent to how people get on with their lives.

  • Bel

    Hilarious if it weren’t so chilling.

    So this man sat down, and in all seriousness, penned this crap, dressed it up as a philosophy, and submitted it to a national newspaper, who, I can only hope, published it tongue-in-cheek.

    Does Miliband really eXpect us to swallow this bilge without question? The piece is shot through with analytical errors of every kind, but that doesn’t surprise me. Perhaps having dumbed down the education system, they expect that such ill-informed pieces will be waved through with approval by an illiterate public.

    Think again, Mr Miliband. Or perhaps, just think.

  • Thanks for that. It nearly cost me my sight!
    I have been unable to resist a rant on the topic of the disgusting little vote-licker.
    (Link)

  • “has all the moral depth of a puddle of warm urine.”

    I rather see him a a puddle of COLD urine.

    Besides the boy looks lik Mr Bean.

  • Sam Duncan

    Milliband, like all modern statists, is in denial. He knows that centralized control doesn’t work – indeed, is actively counterproductive. That is obvious to anyone with an ounce of sense. He is aware, therefore, that the solution lies in decentralization, and “people-power”.

    What he – and all the rest, Tories included – can’t bring themselves to admit is that this means relinquishing the power he has and giving it back to individuals to excercise for themselves. So he ties himself up in knots with the sort of “communitarian” bollocks published in the Telegraph. “Partnership between citizen and state”, and all that guff, as if such an asymmetric relationship was even remotely possible.

    …how can we devolve power, funding and control to the lowest appropriate level, while maintaining high national minimum standards? Can teachers and children inject more creativity into what is learnt, where and how?

    You know the answer to that, David; you just refuse to entertain it.

  • guy herbert

    He knows that centralized control doesn’t work – indeed, is actively counterproductive.

    Oh no he doesn’t. He thinks that what is wrong with old- fashioned central control is that it was insufficiently detailed and “customised” to gain active cooperation. He thinks if you sufficiently engineer the interests of individual members of the public – de-layersing the state so that the realtionship is direct and personal – then they will learn to love Big Brother. That much is the old ultra-left fantasy of unmediated selfless social cooperation, hidden under a mantle of technology and management-speak.

    But Milliband believes in Transformational Government – enabled by technology – which actually means more centralisation of more things. He mistakes quantitative change for qualitative, fluffy language over steel for gentle substance, and sees voluntarism as cold and unfeeling compared with the loving embrace of the organic total state.

    The glorious civic republican movement simply doesn’t accept the private/public distinctions that preoccupy liberals and socialists are of any importance. (Remember the former Liberal Party position on nationalization? ‘It isn’t ownership than matters, it is control.’)

    Nor are they communitarians. That’s important to realise. They don’t want independent mediating institutions (which might mean other than national standards) or informal social controls (which aren’t either customised or susceptible to proper management in the public interest). The “devolution” and “subsidiarity” they seek is quite the opposite of what those vague terms usually connote. It is ensuring that central state power is directly exercised at the lowest practicable level, in order that it may be more effectively applied. Institutions are conduits.

  • Well, this is a lot on diagnosis, with agreement on the main symptoms and prognosis at least.

    But what about treatment?

    Best regards

  • How about Miliband saying “I can f*ck off”?

    …thought not.

    Guy, you nailed it. Miliband cannot contemplate a world not controlled by the State directly via State organs or indirectly by the awarding of contracts and outsourcing.

    How would he react to people saying “I can bypass the State and claim a tax-cut in return”?

  • Tony Bovaird

    Treatment? Surely that means bringing together the main existing resources in some new ways?

    These definitely include the expertise and motivation of people who are fed up with the poor state of public services and already are finding ingenious ways of coping without state help.

    But surely it also includes the expertise of public sector professionals, who really do understand how to help people, even though they often try to do it on their terms, rather than the terms of the service user, and are often hidebound by daft regulations and policies.

    Clearly not all service professionals are up for this, but many are – so the question partly becomes, how to motivate them to align their expertise along with the expertise of service users and committed volunteers and helpers in local communities? Can this be self-organised? If not, what co-ordinating mechanisms would be useful and how can these mechanisms be initiated and governed?

    Whether or not the ‘treatment’ can include the expertise of existing public sector managers and politicians is a more open question – they surely do have knowledge and insights that could be and should be part of the solution. But do they really have the will to share power (read budgets) with service users and frontline service staff?

    I take it that democratically elected politicians are a self-evident necessity but the role they should play is worth debating. If they are too power hungry to share decisions with their citizens, then there are ways of restricting their roles to the very basic decisions we need them to make. Maybe we should revisit the final demand of the Chartists – the only one not yet implemented 150 years after they were formulated – namely that there should be annual elections. Or even stronger – that no politician should be allowed to serve for more than a year.

    And the role of public sector managers? My impression is that this debate seems quite meaningless to most of them?

  • Tony Bovaird

    Treatment? Surely that means bringing together the main existing resources in some new ways?

    These definitely include the expertise and motivation of people who are fed up with the poor state of public services and already are finding ingenious ways of coping without state help.

    But surely it also includes the expertise of public sector professionals, who really do understand how to help people, even though they often try to do it on their terms, rather than the terms of the service user, and are often hidebound by daft regulations and policies.

    Clearly not all service professionals are up for this, but many are – so the question partly becomes, how to motivate them to align their expertise along with the expertise of service users and committed volunteers and helpers in local communities? Can this be self-organised? If not, what co-ordinating mechanisms would be useful and how can these mechanisms be initiated and governed?

    Whether or not the ‘treatment’ can include the expertise of existing public sector managers and politicians is a more open question – they surely do have knowledge and insights that could be and should be part of the solution. But do they really have the will to share power (read budgets) with service users and frontline service staff?

    I take it that democratically elected politicians are a self-evident necessity but the role they should play is worth debating. If they are too power hungry to share decisions with their citizens, then there are ways of restricting their roles to the very basic decisions we need them to make. Maybe we should revisit the final demand of the Chartists – the only one not yet implemented 150 years after they were formulated – namely that there should be annual elections. Or even stronger – that no politician should be allowed to serve for more than a year.

    And the role of public sector managers? My impression is that this debate seems quite meaningless to most of them?

  • “Whether or not the ‘treatment’ can include the expertise of existing public sector managers and politicians is a more open question – they surely do have knowledge and insights that could be and should be part of the solution.”

    Sorry,they are part of the problem.David “Mr Bean” Miliband sees himself as an alpha male,at one time they would never have let him out of the back office.They would eat him alive in Tehran,This creature would be all that was between us and the Caliphate.Princess Tony is bad enough.

    Prime Minister Bean?

  • Paul Marks

    I think that Guy Herbert has got it right here.

  • veryretired

    I agree with Paul about Guy’s analysis. Very astute.

    Statists never surrender power, they only search for more effective means to wield it. If they can disguise that fact with some feel-good sounding doubletalk, then that’s what you’ll hear, but the motives and goals never change.