No, you can't. This is the mindset of our political class.
Labour has this week reneged on its promise to offer universal free childcare for children following Rachel Reeves' delaying of Labour's proposed £28bn of green investments on the spurious grounds of the need to observe fiscal rules.
At the same time, the government - with Labour's connivance - is further restricting our right to protest. Which fits a pattern of hostility to freedom seen recently in the proposed ban on "buy one get one free" offers on fatty foods; the call for cycling helmets to be compulsory; and the demand from Darren Rodwell, Labour leader of Barking and Dagenham Council, to evict families if their children do not snitch on people who commit knife crime.
All this adds up to a pattern. The kneejerk attitute of our ruling class - both main parties and the media - is to say no. Not just "no, you can't do that", but "no, you can't have freedom of movement in the EU"; "no, you can't trade freely with our neighbours"; "no you can't have decent cycling infrastructure": "no you can't have an adequate train service in the north"; "no you can't have decent public support for culture": "no you can't have clean rivers"; "no you can't have free broadband." No, no, no.
Historically, there has been a debate about the merits of collective versus individual action. Our political class has resolved this by declaring neither to be feasible or desirable.
We also see this naysaying attitude in local transport. Too often, the emphasis is upon making car travel harder and more expensive rather than making public transport or cycling easier or cheaper.
We also see it in Starmer's "contract with the British people", which echoes New Labour's emphasis upon people's responsibilities and valorization of "hardworking families":
You can expect the opportunity to acquire new skills but you will be expected to work hard and do your bit. You can expect better neighbourhood policing but you will be expected to behave like good neighbours in your own community too.
To highlight my point, just ask: in what ways are politicians offering an expansion of our opportunities or freedoms? Thatcher allowed tax-payers to keep more of their money; people to buy their houses; and companies to trade freely with the EU. New Labour offered Sure Start centres and more support for the low-paid. But what's the offer now? Where are our ruling class saying (to anyone other than the ultra-rich): "yes, you can do that", or "yes, we can have that"?
George Orwell was exaggerating when he wrote: 'if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever." What we have is something much more familiar to him, that of a petty officious jobsworth saying no.
Why are we in this mess?
Some of the reasons lie in the fact that politicians, like all professionals, are selected to have particular casts of mind. One of these is that they are - in Jaap Stam's beautiful phrase - "busy cunts"; they are toilers running from meeting to meeting and expect the rest of us to lead such monomanic joyless existences.
Also, politicians are selected to have excessive faith in top-down management and to be overconfident about their ability to prescribe what the rest of us should do. The flipside of this is a scepticism - and often even lack of awareness - about the merits of spontaneous order as promoted by Hayek or Ostrom. And so politicians have an inherent bias against freedom - a bias which has the same roots as their lack of interest in economic democracy.
But there's something else, which I regret is not confined to politicians - something pointed out back in 1970 by the great Richard Sennett. Many of us, he wrote, create for ourselves "purified identities":
The threat of being overwhelmed by difficult social interactions is dealt with by fixing a self-image in advance, by making oneself a fixed object rather than an open person liable to be touched by a social situation. (The Uses of Disorder, p6)
This is what Margaret Hodge was (maybe unwittingly) getting at when she said that different food in the shops or different faces in schools "creates fear". If you are a fixed object with a fixed idea of what faces or food should be, then different ones are a threat to that identity and so a cause of fear. Hence the demand for immigration controls.
Hence too demands for crackdowns on other people who aren't like us, be they cyclists, protestors, or poor people wanting cheap food. The outgroup is a threat to be repressed, rather than part of a complex, diverse society.
There's one final thing. Contrast the joyless unambitious naysaying of our political class to John F. Kennedy's 1962 speech promising to put a man on the moon:
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
No British politician today could express such ambition: even Corbyn's modest social democratic proposals were decried as absurd.
Why the huge change? It's because capitalism has changed. In the 60s, the US's economic problem - described by Galbraith's The Affluent Society or Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital - was that it's vast productive potential threatened to exceed demand. Kennedy's response to this was to invest skills and capital in the space race.
Today, however, there is no such potential. Two decades of stagnant productivity mean that nobody is optimistic about what we can achieve through either market forces or state direction. Keynes was of course bang right to say: "Anything we can actually do, we can afford." Our problem is that we cannot actually do very much. Talk of fiscal responsibility as a reason to row back on green investments might be pure drivel, but there is a better reason to do so - that we simply lack the skills and management ability to implement big investments quickly.
In this sense, naysaying is a response to capitalist failure.
Of course, another possible response would be ask why capitalism has failed and whether we can do better. But of course, to do this would be to commit a grave political sin.