State intervention: quality not quanitity
by Max Wind-Cowie
A new poll for PoliticsHome shows that 79 per cent of people believe that the state has too much of a say over what people can and can’t do. This is excellent news for progressive conservatives who have long bemoaned the influence of an overbearing state in people’s lives. However, we should not confuse unnecessary bossiness with much needed intervention.
The progressive conservative argument goes that, sometimes, the state does need to get its hands dirty and get involved in people’s lives. The old left/right debate about how often that should happen is moribund and out of date; the real question is not the quantity of intervention but the quality.
If you want to reduce the impact of the state on the whole of people’s lives then, sometimes, you have to ramp it up in particular areas. For instance, all of the evidence points to the need to intervene in the lives of young children who come from disadvantaged backgrounds in order to prevent a long-term negative impact on their futures. The old libertarian, freedom too crowd may well bemoan such state action but by getting involved early on we can actually reduce the amount of overall intervention. A well -imed, well thought through intervention now can mean less involvement from social services, the police and the criminal justice system later on.
Freedom is important to progressive conservatives, but sometimes you need to act now to ensure it later on.
Andrew Preston
This 'progressive conservatism' is utter garbage. The real name for it is neo-conservatism, as in 'neo-cons'. Totally discredited in the US, but flourishing in the bowels of, and at the top of, the Conservative party.
Translated, what they want is much more of the forced removal of children from their families and placed in the hands of the likes of Barnardos. What they conveniently overlook is that much of the poverty, disfunctional families, and crap jobs is quite simply down to the attitudes and economic policies of the Conservative party.
I'm not the person who first said that the real attitudes of the Conservative party are just Edwardian, but what that means is that people 'know their place', and the old schools are firmly in charge. As I said, 'progressive conservatism' is just garbage.
Michael
I wonder about social conservatism. One might argue that the state has become almost non-existent in certain issues where it once held a very clear position, whereas now value-neutral governance appears to hold sway, and so the question becomes do progressive conservatives believe there is a need to get their 'hands dirty' here too?
You talk, and rightly I believe, about intervening when appropriate in the lives of young children growing up in 'disadvantaged backgrounds' - should progressive conservatives also speak against the common factors that help create that background? A small illustrative example, and perhaps the most controversial; should value-neutrality be pursued with regards sexual promiscuity, even if it could be shown that such conditions tend toward an increase in single-mothers, left to raise a child alone by young fathers who no longer accept the responsibility of sexual encounters? Is there a space for a progressive conservative here to attack those 'sacred cows' you spoke of previously, and question what role abortion and mass contraception plays in the creation of this culture? And lastly, if you decide that liberty dictates the state should have no say in this area of life (and that this is a truly conservative position), then does this entail a rejection or a development of the social conservatism that held sway on both the left and the right benches until only a few decades ago?
Incidentally, I'm not setting out a position here, and I do apologise if you feel this is a barrage of difficult-to-answer questions, but I'm just trying to figure out how the ProgCon project stands on those issues that modern fashionable conservatism tends to remain silent on.