Roadblocked to death?

You may doubt that Downing Street is doing much politics beyond the phone hacking saga at the moment — but it is. The coming week will see the launch of the long-awaited, much-delayed public services White Paper, which is intended to set the framework for more or less every service we receive from the state. You may remember that Cameron heralded it with an article for the Telegraph back in February. Then, he suggested that private and charitable providers would be as privileged as state ones, writing both that, “we will create a new presumption that public services should be open to a range of providers competing to offer a better service,” and that, “the state will have to justify why it should ever operate a monopoly.” But that rather frightened the Lib Dems in government, who equated it with mass-scale privistisation. And so, over months, Cameron’s original conception of things has been debated and whittled away, leaving whatever is to be released in a few days.

It will be instructive, then, to see what has made it through to the finished document. Judging by the Telegraph’s report today, there will some bracing content: from private sector providers and cooperatives to personal budgets. But, given the bitter frustrations that Steve Hilton is said to have had about this process, the result is unlikely to be as decentralising as it might have been. Downing Street sources have even been evoking the old distinction between the reformers and the roadblocks — with the Lib Dems cast, in this case, as roadblocks. There is a sense that a great opportunity has been missed.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this were to become a theme for the rest of this parliament. We’ve already seen David Cameron suggest that the Tories would be able to do more on their own than in partnership with the Lib Dems, a significant change from the first flush of the coalition. Yet there will be even more pressure on him to reheat that message as the election draws closer, when there are votes in it.