News from the New Party

Cameron's socialist phrase book

"I want to briefly sketch the outline of an alternative design. This alternative is - if I may borrow from the socialist phrase-book - the New Jerusalem: the liberal-conservative ideal. It involves a diversity of independent, locally accountable institutions, providing public services according to their own ideas of what works and their own experience of what their users want. It involves a government which acts as a regulator of services, not a monopoly provider - monitoring service standards on behalf of the public, but not always delivering them."

"Because it is people who matter most. This is not political flannel - it is a vital principle of management and reform. Even if the design and the structures of an organisation are imperfect - and I think they often are in the case of our public services - they often work nonetheless, because the people who inhabit those structures make them work. And if we suddenly shifted to a perfect design, a perfect structure, but didn't bring the people with us - the new system would work less well than the old one. That is why I believe there is so much unhappiness in the public services at the moment, and why Mr Blair and Mr Brown are finding that their reforms aren't working. It is not enough for reforms to be right in principle - they have to work with the grain of the professionals."

"We do not want to waste time, energy, resources and - vitally - the goodwill of those who work in public services, with reforms that go first in one direction and then another. Our guiding principles are clear, based on our belief in social responsibility. In place of manic reform at a pace that does more harm than good, a more patient approach that avoids lurching from one direction to another."

• a theoretical commitment to a liberalised regime of public services: independent service providers regulated by government, rather than monolithic public services delivered directly by government;
• a declaration that reform of the public services cannot proceed without the implicit consent of professionals (and this means that public service workers take precedence over the public for whose benefit the services are delivered); and
• a repudiation of radical reform as a matter of principle.