Ed Miliband is delivering the Hugo Young lecture tonight, and will focus on ‘people-powered public services’. All the briefing so far sets it out to be one of those ‘intellectual underpinnings’ speeches, rather than something that sets the world on fire (although Miliband does, to his credit, have a habit of pulling impressive speeches out of the bag when we’re not expecting it, or boring us all to tears when we’ve been told to expect something major). The central premise of it is set out in his Guardian article (and for more background, do read Rafael Behr’s piece on this): it’s about people having more power over their lives. He writes:
‘Indeed, it is about much more than the individual acting as a consumer. We will put more power in the hands of patients, parents and all the users of services.’
This initially sounds like Miliband’s One Nation Labour having a late-stage epiphany about the importance of protecting the consumer against the vested interests of producers.
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