Exploiting a conservative moment

Away from the resurrection of David Miliband, other Labour modernisers convened at the Progress rally earlier this evening. These weren’t just any old party hacks; they were grandees: Douglas Alexander, Tessa Jowell, Caroline Flint, Liam Byrne and Jacqui Smith to name a few: and the audience was reverential.

They were discussing The Purple Book, the latest contribution to the debate about Labour’s future. The central thesis of the book is that the state is passé. As Jowell put it, “People are much more sceptical, much more hostile to the idea of the state spending their money on their behalf.” Jowell mentioned community, faith groups and the family as examples of structures and institutions in which the public are finding solace instead of the state, which had been devalued by a legacy of debt.

These social changes have electoral consequences for the party of big government. All of the speakers urged the need for Labour to embrace choice in public services, a creed once preached by Tony Blair. Caroline Flint warned that the party mustn’t get “backed into an anti-choice corner” by defending the state’s vested interests in health and education, because to do so would be to ignore the aspirations of millions of voters.

In fact, Douglas Alexander said, many aspirational voters have already turned away from socialism. He elaborated, saying that the left had assumed it would benefit from the global financial crisis: that voters would look at the capricious market and seek sanctuary in the benevolent comforts of the state. But the opposite had occurred, and the public have since accepted the right’s arguments about deficit reduction and the size of state.

The upshot was clear: this is a conservative moment. But there was general agreement that the Conservatives are failing to exploit the opportunity fully. The speakers’ collective mantra was, in the words of the impressive Jowell (for whom the audience was ecstatic), “communtiy where possible, government when necessary”. Is that what David Cameron meant by the Big Society?