Blair’s bourgeois dictatorship

Via Blood and Treausre, comes this story about the ultimate New Labour policy initiative:

A new contract between the state and the citizen setting out what individuals must do in return for quality services from hospitals, schools and the police is one of the key proposals emerging from a Downing Street initiated policy review.

Examples include an expectation that a local health authority will only offer a hip replacement if the patient undertakes to keep their weight down. Parents might also be asked to sign individually tailored contracts with a school setting out what the parents must do at home to advance their child’s publicly-funded education.

The police might also promise to achieve a specific response time in a local area, so long as an agreement is struck on the local law and disorder priorities. The aim is to build on the government’s rights and responsibilities agenda, and papers released yesterday by the Cabinet Office speak of seeking “a new more explicit contract between the state and the citizen on agreed public outcomes”.

Here we have everything that makes New Labour so awful in one neat package: a distrust of the people, the centralised authoritarianism, the fetishisation of business as a model to run government services, the rampant managerialism. It is the logical outcome of nine years of New Labour policies, the last cornerstone of Blair’s bourgeois dictatorship. It is impossible to be a democracy if the state can exclude citizens from the services it provides based on some nebolous criteria it has drawn up itself. Moreover, it’s just as easy to exclude the critic of the local MP from receiving benefits for “antisocial thoughts” as it is to deny a smoker a new lung.

All in the name of “people like us”, the middle classes. Even if the middle classes, if they knew what they were getting, are not stupid enough to actually want it. But then again, the way it will be sold to the public is by pretending it will only apply to welfare scroungers, overweight chavs on estates still *gasp* smoking and terrorist sympathisers. Not to people with 2.4 children living in Islington who know which course goes with which wine, no…

(Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words.)