In recent months, the use of Whitehall targets to drive public sector performance has come under unprecedented attack. They are blamed for the Baby P murder, ambulances waiting outside hospitals doors and not unloading patients, too few bobbies on the beat, and so on.

Targets upset front line professionals who feel their discretion has been curtailed, they remove the flexibility needed to deal with complex problems and they encourage box-ticking rather than genuinely high quality services, as institutions are incentivized to meet their targets rather than engender real improvement.

Rather than asking why targets tend to fail, a more interesting question is why have they been the staple of a progressive left government over the last decade – and whether they have an elective affinity with  between progressive policy making. This takes me to Isaiah Berlin’s two conceptions of liberty.

For Berlin, negative liberty was, of course, the lack of restraint, or ‘freedom from’. Positive liberty was self-mastery, the freedom to. Berlin distrusted positive liberty, because when he surveyed history he saw how genuinely enlightened conceptions of positive liberty (you’re not free if you can’t do x) often led to a more sinister argument: that you’re only free if you are actually doing x. This was an excuse for leaders to force their subjects live in a certain way. A way that the leaders had deemed more free, even if in reality it was a totalitarian distortion of freedom.  Hence common Marxist line that people were really more free under Communist rule.

Tony Blair met with Berlin, and berated the professor – “but we are in favour of positive liberty!” What Blair actually meant was he was in favour of ‘effective liberty’.  If plain old fashioned liberty refers to the legal rights we have, 'effective liberty' is about what we are actually able to do. Tony Blair asked Berlin what the point was of having the right to do something, without the resources or capabilities to be able to do it.  

This is an important point. Because a major part of the New Labour project – indeed of any progressive project – is about creating effective freedoms for people.  And now it is also a major part of Demos’ project to forge a Liberal Republic.

Giving people effective liberty doesn’t lead naturally to totalitarianism.  But when it comes to down to the gritty policy detail of actually helping people attain effective liberty, things get more problematic for a progressive.

Generally speaking, progressives want to change the world, and, generally speaking, they have faith that the state can do so.  New Labour certainly did. But New Labour also realized (as do Reeves and Collins in the Liberal Republic) that effective liberty is about more than economic redistribution. For effective liberty, people need soft skills, a good school, empowering social services, high literacy levels, a health system where the quality doesn’t depend on where you live, a strong family, decent housing and so on.

In such a complex world, genuine effective freedom depends on so much.  And a progressive is impatient. Faith in the state leads him to give a myriad of department a myriad of targets to deliver this (targets are a problem in many areas, but the progressive's concern with effective freedom gives him more policy areas to be concerned about). But changing the world always ends up being more difficult than he anticipated. It is far too complex, unpredictable, and changeable.  And a progressive becomes – rightly – more impatient and frustrated at the slow pace of the change. “Why don’t they understand? Why aren’t they moving quicker?!”  Blair was frequently heard to shout.

So more targets are needed because obviously the state diktats aren’t strong enough. And then still more. And then we end up with too few bobbies on beat, ambulances waiting outside hospitals and social workers spending 70 per cent of their time behind a computer screen, which destroys the very of the state in which the progressive believed. Oh the irony. And finally giving up on state diktats, a progressive government might start trying to change people’s behaviour. At which point, Berlin might start getting seriously worried.

Berlin feared the tendency for positive freedom to lapse into totalitarianism.  We should fear that the faith in the state leads irrevocably to a self-defeating reliance on tight performance targets to deliver effective liberty. The task for progressives who are impatient to change the world is how to use the state (and the market and civic society) to create effective liberty without making this mistake.  

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