The Progressive Dilemma

"The Progressive Dilemma is a really important book to me because it’s all about the tension between two models of progressivism: the Fabian state-focused model of reform on the one hand and the bottom-up, empowering, moral model of reform advocated by New Liberals like T H Green and L T Hobhouse. What Marquand does in this book is to show that dilemma between statist reform and bottom-up reform, mainly through the prism of a whole set of people’s lives, including individual politicians – he touches on David Owen, for example. So it’s a collection of essays, really, but each essay returns to this recurrent theme. There is a group of people on the centre left – including myself and David Miliband, who also talks a lot about this book – who have always seen our politics as being about trying to reunite those two strands and who have despaired, really, of the kind of statism that is still dominant in the Labour Party and was part of its undoing when it was in power. It has not been won at all. Furthermore, some Liberals clearly now think that their model of an empowering progressive agenda may be better met by working with the Conservatives. They are attracted to the notions of David Cameron’s ‘big society’, they are attracted to the fact that the Conservatives are doing the right things on surveillance and civil liberties, on scrapping ID cards and scrapping targets. This is a fascinating time because the government has without question already dismantled a lot of state control. When Labour was in government they assumed that you had to have all that state control because people wanted to know public services were being driven forward, so they wanted targets and reassurance about whether public spending was achieving outcomes, and they were very worried about crime and terrorism, so they wanted ID cards and those kind of things. So the coalition is confronting a set of assumptions about what the public wants and it looks – so far – as though it is doing that very successfully. Of course all the professions will love it: the teachers and doctors will love fewer targets. But the challenge will come with events. When you see schools or hospitals failing or you get a terrorist attack, will people maintain that position of support? But I say good luck to them. The tragedy for Labour is that some radical Liberals will say, ‘Well we don’t really like the Conservatives’ approach to the economy and to social justice but when it comes to this kind of empowering, letting-go agenda, we are getting more traction out of the Conservatives than we would have got out of Gordon Brown.’"