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The Unnoticed Battle for the Future of Labour's Public Sector Reform Agenda - Progressive Britain
The Government are delivering much needed public service reform, Ed Dorrell analyses how different key Cabinet members are approaching this task.
![[Archival document] The Government's objective is to set country on a self-sustaining economic (and psychological) recovery path. Our dilemma is that it is difficult (we would say impossible) to achieve this objective quickly enough for the fruits of that achievement to help us to win the next election. We have a 5-year term, in which to achieve a 10-year task. To say that we must achieve our objective in 5 years because that is all we have got, is to ensure failure. Instead, we have to break the 5-year constraint, by pursuing a carefully thought out 4-year election campaign alongside the introduction of policies for recovery. An important part of our approach is to make the public understand this dilemma as clearly as we do ourselves.
In our first Strategy Paper we represented the total process as an over-simplified diagram:
[Diagram of relative productivity. UK starts above 'the west' but is presently below in a period of decline. The diagram continues to a period of turn-around where the UK grows quicker than but is still below the west]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ifengbkg3h3sm4hrzmt7t22r/bafkreic76xrqz3vdkaee5shwz6fgap2obpfbuagecxezynv7hnxcecz6by)
![[Archival document]
Since that paper, it has already become clear that the process of stabilisation will be harder, and the J-curve probably longer, than we had anticipated.
Economic recovery requires the achievement of two subsidiary objective:
i) Laying the basis for the revival of the private sector, during the first 5 years.
ii) Winning the 1983/4 General Election, so that the private sector revival can really get started in the second 5 years.
Any democratic Government trying to arrest economic disintegration faces a familiar dilemma: the choice between popular policies or popular results. The greater the problem it has to solve, the riskier it becomes to pursue 'low risk' policies. The measures needed to lay the foundations for economic revival are so rigorous that they could lose us the next Election.
Just as the original Stepping Stones paper of two years ago suggested that the union problem could be turned into an electoral opportunity, so this paper suggests ways in which tough policies may in fact be stepping stones towards winning the next Election.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ifengbkg3h3sm4hrzmt7t22r/bafkreigycpcln73ijk5wfwlbew6z223gocnbggtv2ydz6bvdhzf4xto2zi)
