DJ Taylor: Whoever you vote for, the Government always gets in

From Commentators, The Independent:

On Friday week the distinguished novelist Ferdinand Mount will deliver this year's George Orwell Memorial Lecture. There is a particular piquancy about both lecturer and subject.

Mr Mount is not only a former head of Margaret Thatcher's policy unit; he is also the Prime Minister's cousin. As for his theme – "Orwell and the Oligarchs" – well, it just happens to coincide with the unveiling of David Cameron's plan to redefine the citizen's relationship with the state.

The fact that we live not in a parliamentary democracy but in a cunningly contrived counterfeit of one, where whoever wins an election the same kind of people are still working the levers of power, is not always appreciated by party activists. Mr Cameron, on the other hand, certainly seems to appreciate it. Above all, he seems to recognise the fact that to most UK citizens the link between a vote and what gets done as a result of it is so convoluted as to barely exist. Hence his assurance that reform will be driven not by short-term political calculations, "but by the consistent, long-term pressure of what people want and choose in their public services".

This sounds a terrific idea until you realise that it is based on an assumption that people know what they want from government, and that government, in its turn, is able to quantify these desires and set about appeasing them. So, how does the average British citizen regard the state? The first problem lies in the existence of that shadowy entity known to social historians as "them". In their myriad guises, "they" can be positively protean, taking in everything from the tax authorities to park-keepers. To my father "they" were a malign and anti-meritocratic force at work to obstruct his and his family's path through life. Sometimes "they" could be confounded – "That's shown the bastards" he once remarked when notified of a favourable examination result – but more often than not "they" would move mountains to ensure that everyone who laboured under their yoke would suffer as much inconvenience as possible.

But if you get rid of "them", what do you put in their place? Here you face another problem; the almost complete lack of civic awareness and communal spirit shown by a good 80 per cent of the population. Orwell himself once proposed that most of the patriotic flag-waving that takes place in this country was carried out by small minorities. The same is true of collective action. It is not even that we are all sturdy individualists, for whom collaboration is a kind of selling out, merely that, rather than having any deeply held opinions about how our relationship to the state might be better managed, we simply want to be left alone while, paradoxically, enjoying all the benefits that the state has to offer. I think Mr Cameron has his work cut out here.