A fascinating event held a few days ago at Policy Exchange, discussing The Future of Progressive Politics. Three of the speakers, Policy Exchange’s Neil O’Brien, John Redwood and Matthew Taylor all gave good articulations of different types of what they regarded as progressive politics. Peter Oborne made a slightly peculiar, but passionate, case for what he termed “regressive politics.” And there was a representative of the Progress group there. It confirmed to me quite how stuck in the mid 1990s a fair element of Labour’s progressive wing are.
Most of the rhetoric from the Progress editor belonged in 1997. Some of it belonged in 1992. In Labour’s progressive wing there seems to be a collective failure to accept that the past twelve years have not achieved what they might have wanted. They completely fail to accept that over a decade has failed to achieve progressive goals – social mobility has gone backwards; relative poverty has worsened; the welfare system remains largely untransformed; and public service reform and choice has ground to a halt thanks to lack of imagination and Prime Ministerial instransigence.
Instead of offering new ideas, the progressive wing of the Labour Party seems to be spending its entire time in an act of self delusion over the past twelve years and self delusion about the Conservative Party’s position. Regarding the latter, note their comments about our view on homosexuality (the Progress editor repeated the comments of Ben Bradshaw) – blithely ignoring the fact that we have, quite rightly, apologised for the disgrace of Section 28; supported Civil Partnerships and equal rights and have two Shadow Cabinet members in civil partnerships.
The progressive wing of the Labour Party have abandoned the battle of ideas. They have vacated the ground of public service reform. They prefer to wallow in delusion and nostalgia. It is now up to the Conservative Party to use innovative means to achieve progressive ends. Our education reform policy; our commitment to tackling poverty; and our dedication to accelerating social mobility, amongst a number of other policy areas show that we are now the only Party putting forward fresh ideas. We are now the principal torch bearers for progressive politics. We must not and will not let down those in our society who have been so badly let down by New Labour.
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But Labour never has been progressive. It has ALWAYS simply wanted to control people’s lives and dictate how they are to behave
Good point King Lear. For too long, however, we have allowed them to own progressive language and even use progressive Tory phrases such as one nation. I’m pleased to say that we have now re-taken that ground we lost.
Kinglear, Labour in that respect are like many Democrats in the US….the very people for whom David has such uncritical admiration.