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.