Health secretary says: ‘If we tell the public that we can’t make anything work, then why on earth would they vote to keep us in charge’

Here is a fuller version of the quote from Wes Streeting’s speech, from the Times’ Steven Swinford.

Bafflingly, some on my own side of the political divide have begun to parrot the same argument. They complain about the civil service. They blame stakeholder capture.

This excuses culture does the centre-left no favours. If we tell the public that we can’t make anything work, then why on earth would they vote to keep us in charge?

New - Streeting goes full throttle on the idea that politicians can’t make the state work and that “nothing happens” when levers are pulled.

“Where there aren’t levers, we build them. Where there are barriers, we bulldoze them. Where there is poor performance, we challenge it.”

He says the complaints are just poor excuses from the right.

“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?”

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.