As the government sets out its recovery plan for the British economy and a sharper and clearer set of dividing lines return to party politics, our political life has a strangely "back to the future" feel about it. Like an ageing rocker, Labour seems to have dusted off some of the favourite tracks of its youth as it promises to raise income tax on big earners, proposes to bring forward major capital expenditure, and delivers a package of support for the elderly and the poor.
But we should be careful about getting too carried away with the idea that our political leaders are following the lead of the TV cop in the hit series Life on Mars and are rushing back to the 1970s.
Exceptional times that require exceptional measures was chancellor Alistair Darling's motif when presenting the pre-budget report. And he meant what he said. This is a pragmatically conceived package that rests on the twin hopes that governmental activism and future redistribution of the tax burden are in line with the popular mood, and that a stimulus now will alleviate the recession sufficiently to offset worries about the growth of the public debt.
Labour's sharpest minds realise as well that anxieties about the purpose and direction of the government that dominated the pre-recession period, up until the summer of 2008, have been only temporarily eclipsed. Between the election that never was of the autumn of 2007, and Labour's conference of 2008, the Conservatives' critique of Labour's reliance upon the big central state and its commitment to top-down bureaucratic regulation, achieved considerable resonance.
At that time some on the centre-left began to propose the wholesale renunciation of social democratic principles and Labour's heritage. In the name of a shallow and overly individualistic idea of liberalism, they urged progressives to renounce the idea of deploying the central state – the political equivalent of asking Wayne Rooney to score goals wearing slippers instead of football boots.
The inadequacy of this kind of argument is now all too obvious. But just as striking was the absence of a coherent and persuasive response about the role and purpose of the state from Labour. Both the ultra-revisionist assertion that we should all now become 19-century liberals, and the self-deluding belief that the British public has suddenly come to love Whitehall, are distractions from the path of renewal for the centre-left. Progressives need to start doing some serious thinking about the role, capacity and limits of the central state.
This means leaving behind the big v small state contrast through which this debate has so far been framed. The left needs to be confident and clear about the continuing importance of the centralised state acting decisively, as Ruth Lister argues on Comment is free.
But this recognition needs to be tempered by the realisation that the increasingly centralised micromanagement of many of our public services has over the last 10 years produced a clunking, overstretched and top-down form of governance. In health, education, policing and transport, we need to devise robust and bottom-up forms of accountable governance.
We need as well to bring back into the centre of our thinking the moral and political imperative of citizen empowerment. This is a widely cherished goal, but has slipped to the margins of government thinking in some key areas. How can we empower individuals as users of public services, as independently minded citizens, and as responsible members of their local communities?
It is now time to gather together the rich but disparate array of projects, social enterprise initiatives and community schemes that attempt to deliver in these areas, and develop these into attractive models for social change. We need before us a plausible and general centre-left account of how public authorities can work in partnership with organisations to achieve socially valuable goals. Only then can the speculative Conservative vision of Burke's "little platoons" replacing the state in providing public services be confidently defeated.
The big vs little state debate quarrel has an echo in the localist vs sceptical debate that breaks out whenever public service reform is discussed. We should have the confidence to step away from the orthodoxies of both camps. Opponents of localism point to the spectre of "postcode lotteries", assuming that this ends further debate. But we have many such lotteries now, in part because the overstretched central state cannot deliver on its promise of uniformity of provision. Here, too, we should reflect on which universal goods and standards ought to be guaranteed by the centre, and where we can reasonably grant communities and local authorities the right to exercise autonomy in setting their own priorities and making decisions that reflect local variations.
These issues are just beneath the surface of our current political situation, but will come back to life as the policy dilemmas posed by the recession deepen. The renewal and refinement of progressive thinking and politics depends to a considerable degree on the gathering together of a range of voices, energies and ideas, as Doreen Massey observes.
At Ippr, we will shortly be launching a major programme aimed at delineating the "smarter state" that we need for the conditions of the 21st century. This is merely one strand of the intellectual fusion needed to support the reinvention of progressive politics to which Jonathan Rutherford. has recently pointed.
It's time that we started developing an account of the shape and powers of the state that we want, and extending our imaginations beyond the one that we're in.
Who owns the progressive future? is the final debate in the series organised by Comment is free and Soundings journal. It will take place in London at Kings Place on December 1 at 7pm. Guardian readers can obtain tickets at a special rate of £5.75 by phoning the Kings Place box office on 0844 264 0321 and quoting "Guardian reader offer". You can also book online. For full details click here.
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