Strategy advisor arrogance

I do not know if anyone else saw this piece of breath taking arrogance displayed by Matthew Taylor - Tony Blair's outgoing chief strategy adviser.

He stressed that he was speaking as a "citizen" not as government spokesman - funny how his comments managed to get reported then!

He criticises the internet for being used to encourage the "shrill discourse of demands" that dominated modern politics.

I wonder who all these people on the internet are?

Who are all these people with blogs and web sites?

Perhaps just perhaps these people are citizens too albeit ones without the ability to get themselves reported in the main stream media because of a government position they hold!

He goes on to say that we have a citizenry which can be caricatured as being increasingly unwilling to be governed but not yet capable of self-government - what arrogance. If successive governments had not had such centralising tendencies then local communities might have been given the power, responsibility and resources to do more for themselves. Instead we live in a country where the general assumption is that we should do everything centrally. The national government controls more and more and if it does not directly control something then it will set prescriptive targets and standards that leave very little by way of choice for those who are delivering whatever service locally

Part of the problem according to him is the "net-head" culture itself, which was rooted in libertarianism and "anti-establishment" attitudes.

And what precisely is wrong with this Mr Taylor?

Unless of course you are always pro establishment and anti libertarian yourself.

In my opinion a lot of the problem is an electoral system that does not work, governments which tend to centralise everything and a media which by and large panders to the government agenda. When it does not pander to their agenda it is more interested in sex scandals than in the real issues which concern most of the people in this country. I suspect a lot of bloggers are fairly frustrated with the inability to get their message to the government of the day via the media or the ballot box and hence have found an alternative outlet for their frustrations

What a surprise.