Analysis is articulated by Matthew Taylor:
"This is nothing new; voters have long expressed a simultaneous preference for lower taxes and better resourced public services. But, as the world has become more complex and as we have become less deferential, the need for us to acknowledge the tensions between our interests and desires has arguably become more acute.
In more and more areas it can feel like people demand incompatible outcomes: cheap flights and action against climate change; affordable housing and protecting every inch of countryside; low inflation and enough service workers but a crack down on immigration; less centralisation of power and guarantees of uniform service standards; tough action against security threats and the extension of human rights.
It is the job of policy makers and politicians to find ways through these dichotomies but this can only be done if citizens are posing problems which they are willing to see solved.
It is in this more challenging context that the destructive relationship described by Blair becomes so much more damaging.
The media help people deny that these are real dilemmas and that their resolution is as much a matter of our own behaviour as it is of the skills of politicians.
Instead the media has become a disorganised conspiracy to maintain the population in a perpetual state of self-righteous rage.
At a time when new challenges in our world and our lives mean politicians and citizens need a richer relationship than ever before the nature of the modern media help to ensure that it is more impoverished.
This is why a grown up discussion with the media and the development of new, more balanced and discursive online forums is an important part of a pro-social strategy."
Source:
The job of policy makers...