Health Secretary Wes Streeting has urged Labour colleagues to stop making excuses and blaming the system for the slow pace of change in public services.
“This excuses culture does the centre-left no favours,” Streeting told a think tank conference.
“If we tell the public that we can’t make anything work, then why on earth would they vote to keep us in charge?”
It comes after a former close aide to Sir Keir Starmer claimed the government had been “hobbled” by regulators, campaign groups and other “stakeholders” who had a vested interested in preserving the status quo.
Writing in The Times, Paul Ovenden, who quit as Sir Keir’s director of political strategy last September after offensive messages he had sent in 2017 surfaced, said the British state had got “bigger and bigger while simultaneously and systematically emasculating itself”.
He claimed there was now “a political perma-class that exists within every party and every department – one whose entire focus is on preserving their status within a system that gives them meaning”.
The prime minister has also spoken of his frustration at the obstacles standing in the way of change.
He told MPs on the Commons liaison committee last month: “Every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, [and] arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be.”
Streeting did not mention Sir Keir by name in his speech at the Institute for Government (IFG) annual conference – but his remarks will be interpreted as a shot across the PM’s bows, amid continued speculation that the health secretary is preparing to mount a leadership challenge.
He said: “We are not simply at the mercy of forces outside of our control. Our fortunes are in our hands.
“And it is precisely because we on centre-left believe in the power of the state to transform people’s lives, that we are best placed to change it.”
He added: “Where there aren’t levers, we build them. Where there are barriers, we bulldoze them. Where there is poor performance, we challenge it.”
He said reform of public services was “one of the greatest challenges of our age”.
“Failure in this area has led to disaffection, cynicism, and ultimately the rise of populists,” he added.
He expanded on the theme in a Q&A with journalists, warning that “giving the public this sense that you elect people to do things and change things and then say ‘actually I don’t think we have got any agency to do that’ – well then why bother? Why bother voting?”
This was a “really bad place for a democracy to be”, he argued, adding that the answer was for the government to “assert ourselves confidently with the right set of values”.
His comments were echoed by Dame Louise Casey, who was last year brought in by Sir Keir to drive through his “plan for change” as the government’s lead non-executive director.
She told the IFG conference the government needed to “just stop” complaining about how difficult it was to change things and urged civil servants to adopt a “grip it and fix it” culture instead.
