Progressive Alliance? What Progressive Alliance?

There is a thought-provoking article in today’s Guardian from Tony Wright. In it he gets to the root of the issue as to why a re-alignment of the centre left hasn’t happened, didn’t happen after the election in May, and is not likely to happen anytime soon.

It is the challenge about how politicians on the centre-left view the State and its future. Wright points to a real argument is opening up about the size, shape and role of the state.

“Part of the argument is to make the distinction between those who see deficit reduction as a political opportunity and those who accept it as an economic necessity… If people come to feel that the cuts are not the product of grim necessity but of an ideological enthusiasm for reducing the state then that common sense will change. What will not, however, is the debate that has started about the state, and Labour needs to be part of it. Simply defending the state will not be enough – nor will attacking cuts without describing the alternative.urope have nothing distinctive to offer.”

Wright cites Tony Judt’s chiding that “Social Democrats in today’s Europe have nothing distinctive to offer”, and claims that among the parties of the left: “There is a profound disorientation of ideas. The neoliberal ascendancy of the last 30 years has crashed to the ground, but the materials for its replacement have not yet even begun to be assembled. In every sense it is a time for fundamentals, on the economy, society and political system, in the circumstances in which we now find ourselves. It is time for some genuinely big ideas, capable of finding public resonance.”

He hopes, probably in vain, that the forthcoming Labour leadership contest will give some impetus to this important debate and crucially he contends that then “…we might start to build a progressive alliance that is worthy of the name.”