A post about the Liberal Democrats and choice from the excellent Liberal Dissenter.
The party’s critics of choice are not necessarily opposed to choice per se but see it as a second order problem. Without raising expenditure and overall standards, they say, choice simply gives an advantage to the sharp elbows of the articulate middle classes and leaves everyone else with no choice but an inferior service.
The party’s advocates of more choice believe that public services must match the heightened expectations of the savvy bourgeois consumer if they are to retain any value. Middle class people no longer tolerate being told by some bureaucrat which school or hospital they must use.
My problem with both these camps is that they have ended up making the same mistake as socialists and conservatives, making a fetish of a system (whether the traditional public sector or the free market) rather than considering the outcomes.
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