Yesterday's public reform plan from the government, Putting the Front line First: Smarter Government is a good example of the inextricable and complex interface between public services, policy-making and politics.
The fact that the report, on which the chief secretary to the Treasury, Liam Byrne, has been working on for months, was launched by the prime minister, indicates its political importance.
The Guardian this morning says that there is, "at last" discernible difference between Labour and the Conservatives.
Byrne's argument is that, having funded the state properly and then opened it up, Labour's task now is to link it in new ways to consumers.
The report itself focuses on three areas of public sector reform: the interaction between citizen and state; the relationship between central and local government; and, most controversially, streamlining Whitehall.
Promise to abolish quangos
Much of the comment has focused on the last of these, with its promise to abolish quangos, to cut spending on management consultants and to cut the number of senior civil service posts.
Alan Leaman, the chief executive of the Management Consultancies Association, described the halving of consultancy spend as "perverse" and arbitrary. He said it would result in the government robbing itself of the ability to use consultants when it could be valuable to do so.
In Whitehall, there has already been strong reaction from the senior public servants' union, the FDA, about the imposition at the end of last week of new redundancy terms for civil servants, without union agreement. The union said the government had "abandoned any meaningful negotiation".
But the other parts of the report focus on moving services online, and on recasting government's relationship with citizens.
Kable reports that this is part of the "the third generation of changes" to public services.
Over the next year, the government will say how it plans to move transactions online, starting with student loans, jobseekers' allowance, working tax credits and child benefit.
In 2011, VAT and employer tax returns will move exclusively online. Brown said this could save £400m as a first step and billions further on.
