Hey, this isn’t hard, insists Janet Daley in London’s Daily Telegraph. When it comes to the great public services delivered by the welfare state you have to make your choice.
You either believe that the state should administer the delivery of these services by controlling them from the centre, or you do not.
But, she complains, the British Conservative Party wants to have it both ways, or rather three ways, at once.
On the one hand Tory leader David Cameron want to return the right of teachers to teach. On the other hand he wants to mandate the grouping of children by ability. And he wants to mandate the teaching of reading using “synthetic phonics.”
Then there’s the question of who to decentralize power to: the teaching professionals or the parents. Cameron obviously has to appeal to the government teachers. But he also wants to return power to parents.
It’s easy to tell conservative reformers to get a clue. But their task is gigantic.
And it starts with the basic problem that most people instinctively do believe that someone should sit at the center of society and just decide the big quesions of education and health care. It can’t be that hard, can it?
Over 160 years ago Tocqueville already understood that the natural tendency of democracy is to have the government do it.
We conservatives, who so blithely order our leaders to introduce “choice,” should get a clue ourselves. We are asking them to do the impossible. Well, almost.
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