Miliband wants to smash up Whitehall and put YOU in charge of public services

Tonight, Ed Miliband is making a bold step into the world of public services. It’s an area that Miliband has been accused of avoiding so far as Labour leader – but that’ll be blown out of the water over the next few days. Indeed this is being seen within the party as “public services week”. Wednesday sees a triple-header of speeches from Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt, Shadow Care Minister Liz Kendall and manifesto chief Jon Cruddas. 

But the framing for the week will be set today with Miliband’s Hugo Young lecture at the Guardian this evening – he wants to smash up Whitehall and put the power to shape public services in your hands.

Understandably this morning there’s been a focus on the nitty gritty of what Miliband’s speech means, and a search for easily explicable examples. An early focus has been on giving parents the power to act and help drive up standards in schools – allowing parents to work with teachers to turn around failing schools without waiting for Ofsted to tell them something needs to change. Parents often know when their school isn’t working properly. So do teachers. So long as this doesn’t become a means of pitting parents against teachers, and instead encourages collaboration between the two, then this seems like a sensible and empowering prospect. This is about making sure aberrations like the Al-Madinah Free School fiasco don’t happen again.

But boiling Miliband’s plans down to a single policy idea – or even a handful of policy ideas – misses the point of tonight’s speech. What we are potentially looking at is the most radical devolution of power from the central state to local communities and local authorities in the modern era. No longer, Miliband suggests, should the state be content to treat the public as “passive recipients of services”, nor should it rely on “market-based individualism” as a means of delivering vital support and services. What Labour will be calling for, it could be argued, is a third way. That means the state will need to learn to let go and “put more power in the hands of patients, parents and all the users of services” and deliver people-powered public services.

At the core of Miliband’s argument is what always made Blue Labour compelling for me (yet what the name and some of the hoopla around it distracted from). Maurice Glasman and others argued convincingly that devolving power down to communities and away from the centralising elites was a way not only to preserve a strong and resourceful state, but also to save politics from the apathy and disinterest that has overwhelmed it in recent decades. As Miliband will argue this evening – again using the framing of Teddy Roosevelt – unaccountable power makes things tough for the little guy.

Want to get people interested in politics? In what happens in their local area? In the services they rely on and the support they need? Then stop patting them on the head and telling them what is best for them. Stop doing things to people and start doing things with people. The state must always play a central role in delivering public services, but it doesn’t have to be distinct, aloof and controlling. Nor does it have to be privatised, mechanical and calculating. Because that’s not what communities are like, or what people are like. And if services are provided in that way then they soon distrust them or take them for granted. As Miliband will say tonight:

“Wherever possible, it is right to devolve power down. Because the centralised state cannot from Whitehall diagnose and solve every local problem. By hoarding power and decision-making at the centre, we end up with duplication and waste in public services – and fail to serve the people.”

Hear hear. And yet of course the response Miliband will most likely face from the public is cynicism and silence. In part that’s the perfect encapsulation of what Miliband is trying to overturn. No-one cares about politics anyone because they think they can’t do anything about it. And Miliband is far from the first Labour leader to talk of devolving power. As I wrote last week:

“the cynical amongst you (and it often pays to be cynical) will say that opposition politicians always, ALWAYS, claim that they want to give power away…Labour oppositions and governments too have shown too great a difference between talk and walk when it comes to moving the agency of the British people away from the rarified halls of Whitehall and Westminster and into the homes of Wigan and Walsall.”

Ed looks set to talk a good talk on giving away power tonight, but the impact on this speech and this agenda likely won’t be felt until that power begins to dissipate throughout Britain into communities and town and homes and workplaces. Tonight, we are promised “crunchy examples” of what this all might mean, and rumours circulate that a big policy is being held back for the speech. That might help people to understand the size and scale of what is being proposed here.

The direction of travel is good though. But now the policy car needs to start moving quickly in that direction. And what direction is that I hear you ask? Well it’s away from Whitehall – and it’s heading towards you…