Is there no U-turn that this shameless government will not indulge, helped by their handmaiden, the Daily Telegraph? At least, Brogan fences the slurry in, although it oozes and drips through the cracks in the fence. Now, casting my mind back, I seem to recall that targets, micro-management and huge public expenditure without gain are all hallmarks of one G. Brown Esq. So how can this ‘target culture’ be derided as Blairite?
In an interview, Mr Byrne said: “We need a power shift from Whitehall ministers and civil servants that currently have the power and move it to citizens.
“We know the argument for public services has got to change so we have been developing a strategy that takes public services away from a target culture to giving people rights and entitlement to core public services.”
What will this shift entail? Liam Byrne describes this latest stage of reform, and when did we never have a period of reform, as giving individuals a set of rights and, if they are not met, you get to complain.
Well, as a member of the public, I would like to demonstrate near Parliament, wear a “Bollix to Brown” T shirt and ensure that nephews could read. And I can complain to the people who buggered up in the first place. And what do people want when they complain? They want redress. If they can’t get the rights, they get the compensation.
A new way of using your money to puff up Brown’s largesse and promote dishonesty. Incentives to lie and cheat by crying that rights are infringed, to be bought off by gold, all helped out by that nice Mr Brown, who understands my needs. This is one last ditch effort to bribe the electorate at the expense of widening compensation culture and increasing something for nothing expectations.
Good thing the money has run out.
Yes it a popular trick now – “rights” not as a limitation on government power, but as an excuse for it.
In ancient Rome “libertas” went from meaning the freedom of Roman citizens to meaning free bread provided by the state (it was that crude – on the back of Imperial coins there are sometimes bushels of wheat with the word “libertas” underneath).
In the modern world “rights” have indeed been (to some extent) mutated from being an opposition to violation (either by government or by private criminals) of people. To the demand for goods and services financed by force and fear.
As for community action – this used to mean voluntary cooperation (whether organizing a church fate, an athiest society lecture, a charitble work, or a mutual aid activity) now “community action” means a group of people getting together (normally organized by paid specialists) in order to demand bigger subsdies and other such.
The Community Organizer in Chief and his ACORN and Americore “activists and organizers” would smile.
As for the Daily Telegraph – I know little of it, I stopped reading it long ago.
From the article: “Entitlements to personal tuition in schools, minimum GP waiting times and access to neighbourhood policing are among the proposals being put forward.”
One man’s entitlement is another man’s obligation.
What kind of Political Class pervert wants a world where everyone is beating on the politician’s door, demanding that the politician force his neighbors to help him? Sounds like that world might be as unpleasant for the Political Class as for the rest of us.
Back in distant history, wasn’t the Telegraph seen as the “Tory” paper? But this article does not so much show an outbreak of far-left tendentiousness as an outbreak of rampant laziness. It is obviously just a quick cut & paste from the latest government press release. Just some filler between the ads. Why not? The marks keep on buying the paper anyway.
It is a clever piece of party politicking. Expansion of the state is by-product, not aim.
First they cater to their own left-wing middle-class constituency, which is bristling about (some) civil liberties, and starting to splinter off, but is ideologically soaked in the idea of ‘social and economic rights’ as more important. But they also succeed in dressing that appeal up as consumerism for the general public.
Meanwhile its real function is as another piece of scorched-earth. When the promises prove impossible to deliver, given they all cost potentially infinite quantities of taxpayer’s money if delivered through the state*, then they can say: “Look Labour gave you all these rights, and the wicked Tories have taken them away.”
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* Which is not to say they are impossibilities for a non-Stalinist polity. People from elsewhere in the industrialised world are bewildered by the idea that is was a miracle of the benificent state to be guaranteed an appointment with an onchologist within a fixed period after initial diagnosis. They don’t understand why you don’t just call a specialist (in anything) and make an appointment.
Liam Byrne resembles Lavrentiy Beria far too much in my opinion. The fact they share initials doesn’t help. Of course, he can’t help what he looks like, and that’s not the reason I distrust and dislike him. The fact that he is, of his own free will, a minister in the NuLabor crime family is the reason I’d like to send him to the salt mines, to reflect upon his sins.
Christopher Booker (of the Sunday Telegraph) has long warned of the lazyness of modern journalists.
The old image of the hard drinking journalist hid the reality that these people trusted no statement and checked everything.
And checked it themselves – they did not refer back to what they had been taught at school and university. Journalists like Frank Johnson (late of the Daily Telegraph) left school early and never went to college anyway. They did not have memories of being taught X, Y, Z, (British Empire evil, F.D.R.’s New Deal wonderful success…….) so they checked everything themselves – and did not trust sources. They were “researchers” real ones – not the sort that are produced by the modern education system.
Still what matters is not whether has been in universities or not (still “I would say that” as I spent so many years in the places). What matters is whether one believes, or half believes, what one is taught there (even absorbed “compassionate conservatism”, whilst being only half awake at college – like poor drunken George Walker Bush) or whether one doubts and thinks.
Whether one is one’s own man.
Of course the idea of the Labour party government is to bind the incomming Conservative government – by declaring various health, eduation and welfare benefits legal “rights”.
Of course the incomming Conservative government could repeal these statutes – but would then be attacked by the media (as taught by the education system) for “stripping people of their basic rights”.
The real question is – does Mr David Cameron and co really want to control government spending anyway?
I was prepared to give David Davis the benefit of the dbout – but David Cameron?