Wanted: a new theory of the state.
| Author | Parker, Simon |
| Position | Essays |
The last election was a battle for theory as well as seats. Much to the dismay of some of their own PPCs, the Tory high command fought on a platform that made explicit reference to a 'post-bureaucratic age' and a 'big society'. One leading Conservative memorably described the big society as 'bollocks' during the campaign (Watt, 2010), and there is an argument that the sheer airiness of the idea cost crucial votes and contributed to the outcome of a coalition government.
But Cameron's team knew what they were doing--this was a raid deep into Labour's intellectual territory aimed at severely limiting the left's potential for renewal. By attempting to absorb the liberal tradition through a coalition with the Lib Dems, and by rebranding ideas like mutualism, post-bureaucracy, social enterprise and community activism as Conservative, Cameron's Tories are deliberately trying to limit the range of new thinking available to the left.
These should have been Labour's ideas--they were developed by left-of-centre think tanks (1) and in many cases they did influence the last government's policies. But by absorbing most of Labour's heterodox thinking, Cameron hopes to push the opposition back towards exhausted traditions of centralism, managerialism and statism. At a time when budget cuts of some kind are essential, the Tories have a prime opportunity to paint Labour as a dinosaur party, wedded to the central state because it has nowhere else to turn.
In this article, I want to argue that Labour has exhausted many of the theoretical traditions that have sustained it over the past decade, if not the past century. The state and society it will inherit at its next election victory will be very different to those it left behind in 2010, and the party will almost certainly have to adapt its thinking to the Coalition's legacy of a smaller, more decentralised kind of government. The next party leader needs to open up some challenging debates about Labour's political and public management philosophy.
Exhausted traditions
The period immediately after a change of government is probably a uniquely bad time to try and assess the performance of an outgoing administration--the press, media and public are engaged in a brief moment of repudiating what some see as the past government's bossiness and profligacy. On the domestic front, history will undoubtedly be kinder to Labour. It will probably record a government that genuinely did raise standards in almost every area of the public service and improved many facets of national life, albeit at great financial cost (2)--health, science and culture policy stand out as particular successes (Uberoi et al, 2009).
But it will also record that Labour tested a number of ideas to their logical conclusion, if not to their exhaustion. To be clear, I do not mean that these exhausted ideas were necessarily wrong, or that they have no place at all in thinking about the future. What I mean to say is that an exhausted idea has nothing new to offer us, and that it cannot be a source of renewal.
The first idea is centralisation, which is exhausted because there is simply no further to go. Look at the international data and the UK stands out as the second most fiscally centralised country in the developed world, beaten only by tiny New Zealand (OECD, 2009). The OECD does not, unfortunately, collect data on the amount of regulation and targetry that central governments impose on lower tiers, but it is a fair bet that the UK would come close to the top of that list as well. It is nigh on impossible to imagine that more...
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