For the last 50 years in Britain we have been living with the Attlee government welfare settlement, in which public services were to be free at the point of delivery and financed out of general taxation. The goal was to transform Britain’s political democracy into a social democracy, and it was partly successful.
Tony Blair came to power promising to rethink the Attlee settlement. He said that in place of the tired old debates on incremental improvement and a bit of extra cash something more radical was required. Nearly five years on, the public services are under the microscope as never before but the brief flickers of new thinking seem to have been snuffed out. With precious little ideological or class commitment to bolster it in bad times, Labour could lose the next election if it fails to deliver the promised improvements to the NHS, state education and the other main services. It may not even matter how awful the Tories are.
But there is an idea-applicable across many of the public services-which has not been tried: top-up the income the services receive from general tax by charging the better-off people who use them according to their means. This would give the services a lot more money, tie the better-off into a single system, and encourage them to lobby for improvements. The system would also remain relatively equitable.
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