Wes Streeting has hit out not-so-obliquely at Starmer this morning for going too slowly in government. Ramping up the leadership campaign…
Speaking at the Institute for Government’s day-long conference today Streeting raged at talk of “levers” not working and the state getting in the way:
“Where there aren’t levers, we build them. Where there are barriers, we bulldoze them. Where there is poor performance, we challenge it.”
He said the right uses those excuses: “Bafflingly, some on my own side of the political divide have begun to parrot the same argument… If we tell the public that we can’t make anything work, then why on earth would they vote to keep us in charge?” Who could that be?
Co-conspirators may remember what Starmer was moaning about at the Liaison Committee before Christmas three weeks ago:
“Every time something has gone wrong in the past, successive governments have put in place another procedure or another body or another consultation to try to stop ourselves ever making a mistake again… My experience now as prime minister is of frustration that every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be, which is among the reasons why I want to cut down on regulation, generally and within government.”
It’s a leverage game…
UPDATE: Wes-sceptic sources point the finger at a Telegraph article the Health Secretary penned in March last year:
“The abolition of NHS England – the world’s largest quango – is the beginning, not the end. Patients and staff alike can see the inefficiency and waste in the health service. My team and I are going through budgets line by line, with a relentless focus on slashing bloated bureaucracy.
Penny Dash, the new Chair of NHS England, has identified hundreds of bodies cluttering the patient safety and regulatory landscape, leaving patients and staff alike lost in a labyrinth of paperwork and frustration.”
Cue complex inter-factional arguments about what taking on the blob actually means, who is moaning and who is doing…
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