PUBLIC SERVICES, LIB DEMS AND THE COALITION
Dear Colleague,
Many of our constituents and supporters work in what we loosely call public
services and our party has a long and proud tradition of supporting the need
for and vocation of public services.
Relationships with the "public sector" have become made more
difficult recently by the tough but necessary attempt to control the budget and
make pensions sustainable. Relationships have not been helped by the
willingness of the media to create the kind of vicious and pointless
polarisation of public v private reminiscent of Thatcherism at
its worst; nor by the more party-political driven
elements of the union movement.
However, it is becoming increasingly evident that our coalition
partners "have a problem ' with public
services as conventionally understood- specifically with the state or local
government delivering public services and by a series of
incremental steps -some already taken- intend irrespective of financial
considerations to radically enfeeble if not eliminate government's capacity to
directly provide or run public services.
This clear preference for a more feeble state stems not just from
cynicism about public service ethos but from a clear though usually, unargued conviction that government can always
satisfactorily find in a market what it strives to accomplish.
Our party does not, I believe, share this belief and nor do our
constituents and the wider electorate. However, it clearly lies behind some of
the legislative moves made in the areas of health, education, employment and
home affairs and underpins some of the suggestions being made as part of the
mid-term review.
It is for Liberal Democrats working honestly to reduce the deficit and
make government ever more efficient to contest this ideological drift that at
times wholly undermines those primary objectives.
With that in mind I am seeking to
re-establish the Beveridge Group as a focus for articulating these concerns.
The Beveridge Group was established in the 2001 parliament to defend and
develop the place of the public service ethos in national life but specifically
to express anxieties about the Huhne Commission's
support for PFI - an anxiety which it turns out was well founded. Amongst the
founder members was our own Chief Whip who contributed some excellent papers to
the debate.
I would like you to consider seriously whether you would like to be associated
with the Beveridge group whose current task would be importantly to
re-engage the party with the vast mass of ordinary, decent public service
workers (and their families) and to progress in an amicable, open eyed and
reasoned way within the Coalition this critical debate.
In responding to this e-mail, be aware that all responses unless otherwise
stated by you will be treated as absolutely confidential and that
the objectives of the group are both important and narrow (i.e. not in conflict
with membership of other groups).
It would be
a sad consequence if we awoke from our nightmare travails of deficit reduction
in 2015 and found we had accidentally re-designed the state in a way we were
uncomfortable with. A worse consequence could be a government distracted by the
latter failing to achieve the former.
John Pugh