Making Whitehall work
Miljenko Williams, Labour activist and writer
Miljenko Williams is a writer and a language trainer. His qualifications
include a Film & Literature degree from Warwick University and a
Publishing Master from Salamanca University/Santillana Publishing Group.
He is a member of the Labour Party. Most of his volunteering activities for
the Party have covered online activities, where he helped set up the first
Chester CLP website.
Twitter - @eiohel
Labour has to win in the South if it is win the policy arguments and make a post-2015
parliament governable. In a sense, the idea of a moral majority must make its return.
The current coalition government of Tories and Liberal Democrats has ushered in a
parliament of policy-making duplicity. Voters will not accept another five years of the
same. Labour therefore needs to win that moral high ground – as well as gather itself
sufficient voter numbers to win the general election.
If Labour wants to sell a One Nation concept, it cannot afford to be absent in such
key battlegrounds as southern England. People have, perhaps rightly, questioned the
One Nation rhetoric. However, as its outlines begin to surface and firm up, the
wisdom of its initial diffuseness is becoming clear. As a document from Labour’s
Southern Taskforce said earlier this year: “One Nation Labour believes that Britain
should work for everyone, not just a few.” And if anything can go to the heart of
southern England's preoccupations, as well as help build and sustain a coherent
Labour presence in these regions, it is this definition of Ed Miliband's project. A
Britain whose businesses and the government work for the benefit of everyone, and a
Britain whose economy manages to serve itself precisely by serving its people.
Too often, the inertia and permanence of Whitehall have beaten back the attempts of
passing ministers to make it more amenable to change. However, the kind of change
being brought about at the moment by the government doesn't bear thinking about.
If the traditional job of the civil service was, in effect, to mediate the wilder ideas of
the more ambitious political empire-builders, what has gone wrong with respect to
this gung-ho coalition? Widespread privatisation in health; a creeping process of
deprofessionalisation in education; the destruction of a legal aid ethos in principle
and reality; the total victory of energy suppliers over customers; and the imposition of
a bedroom tax on what is – in its vast majority – a constituency of the disabled, which
has been all carried out and implemented under the supposedly restraining eyes of
the British civil service.
In truth, all these matters and more show that even the civil service, as it currently
stands, works only for the part of Britain that financially benefits from global
corporatism – the rentier class. The already brazen sponsors of our elected
revolutionise.it
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