Foreign secretary David Miliband gave the latest installment of Demos’s politics 2010 lecture. The speech provided an eloquent skewering of the Tories desire to will progressive ends through conservative means but provided a less than convincing argument about the meaning and relevance of progressivism itself.

Jorge Luis Borges once quipped that the Falkland’s war was like watching two bald men fighting over a comb.   At its worst the tussle between Labour and the Conservatives over the progressive mantle can seem the same.  Both compete to display their sincerity in offering abstract nouns like empowerment, “decentralisation” and social justice. Yet they often do so in a manner seemingly ignorant of the economic and political crises in which they are both engulfed. In Miliband's case both political mistrust and rising economic insecurity were lightly glossed over - public anger was treated more as a passing fad than as a response to the profound failures of the UKs political and economic establishment.

 The Conservative’s rhetorical antipathy to the state and their tendency to blame “big government” for all societies ills has created a series of straw men that Miliband knocked down with aplomb. He was right to say,  “We do not reveal a powerful populace simply in the act of withdrawing the sate”.  He succinctly encapsulated the core social democratic insight that “ a powerless government simply means more power for the already powerful”.

Yet Miliband was much weaker on specifying the type of state he wanted to see, how it needs to be reformed and where it needs to act as a countervailing power to sources of domination within society and the economy.  To make the case for the Empowering State, Labour surely needs less ambiguous examples than the bail out of the banking system, which Miliband cited as evidence of the Government protecting people from risks beyond their control.   Far from protecting the public the bailout has effectively transferred risk from the private to the public sector at taxpayers expense. After a period of frenzied mergers, the surviving banks are famously bigger than ever before and still more essential to the system, while charging usurious levels on loans and credit cards at the expense of everyone else.  

While the State undoubtedly acted to prevent financial collapse there is little evidence that it negotiated a deal with the banks that worked in the wider public interest. And herein lies the real challenge for the election narrative that Miliband was honing at Demos – not merely to advocate for the increased role of the State but to convince a mistrustful electorate that it is capable of acting in the wider public interest.   His proposal for a “reset referendum”  - looking at not only electoral reform but also local government and the House of Lords – is intriguing in this regard. Let’s hope for Labour’s sake that they can put some democratic flesh on these bones between now and the manifesto.

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