John Reid has claimed that the "politics of consumerism" is the next stage in the development of new Labour.

Speaking at Paisley University in Scotland, the health secretary called for greater choice in the public services and added that Labour could not allow the right to hold a monopoly on the politics of consumption.

"I won’t be party to such a calamitous retreat - desertion - from the battleground of social reality," he said.

He went on to say: "New Labour and I hold and will develop a politics of consumerism which does not detract from the enjoyment of that experience, but ensures that the consumer, who is determined to shape her own life, is also aware of her potential contribution to the wider systems on which she depends."

However, Lord Browne, the chairman of BP and close ally of Tony Blair, used a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos to criticise the spread of "pseudo-markets" within the public sector.

Attempts to create internal markets in the public sector were "damaging professional people who probably should not be subject to these pseudo-markets", he said.