The Conservatives have made much over recent weeks of their newly-minted credentials as a ‘progressive’ party – or at least of their claim to be able to meet ‘progressive ends by conservative means’. The progressive goals in question are not controversial: the reduction of poverty, narrowing of inequalities (especially in education and health), promotion of social mobility and cultivation of fairness.

What is less clear is what they mean by ‘conservative means’. So far, shadow cabinet ministers have defined them almost entirely negatively; the key test of whether an approach is ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’ seems to be whether it is reliant on, in particular the central state and – even more particularly – on the central state generating ‘top-down’ solutions. In this sense the new Conservatives are very old-fashioned indeed: state = bad; society = good.

There is a good dose of straightforward politics in this. The Tories want to portray Gordon Brown as an inveterate statist, constantly on the lookout for opportunities to run our lives from Whitehall. Statements from Brown which add colour to the caricature are relentlessly deployed. The most significant, and most often repeated, are Brown’s assessment that in health care provision, ‘the consumer is not sovereign’ and that ‘only the state can guarantee fairness’. These utterances have been plucked from lengthy, thoughtful, dense speeches by the prime minister, and needless to say are used entirely out of context. But politics is a tough business – and while the arguments supporting the claims are sophisticated, the fact remains that these are Brown’s views.

The Conservative counter-claim, at least at first sight, is that the central state is not – or is no longer – the engine of progress. In a speech to Demos on fairness, the shadow chancellor George Osborne said: ‘The causes of poverty run much deeper, and the consequences of poverty are much broader, than the narrow focus on redistribution of income that has been the dominant approach of this Labour government.’ He also argued that ‘monopoly provision by monolithic public services’ generates as much unfairness today as supertax in the bad of days of old Labour. Michael Gove in his address to the ippr, declared that Labour had turned schools into ‘homogenised locations for delivering the same, centrally-agreed product’ and that educational inequalities have widened since 1997 (a claim which is disputed by some experts). In a recent speech to Reform, Andrew Lansley called for an end to ‘nannying’ by the government on the issue of obesity.

The Conservative critique of Labour’s over-reliance on central state solutions has force. Since 1997, the Labour governments have sometimes relied too heavily on centrally generated solutions, and remain deeply conservative on necessary reforms to health and education provision. Some progress has been made on devolving from central to local state institutions – but continents have drifted faster; and on this the Conservatives can claim, with their plans for elected mayors and the replacement of council tax capping with referenda, to be in the lead. The Fabian instinct for planning, tidiness, standardization remains too strong an element of Labour’s DNA. Ed Balls not only mandates cooking lessons in school, but also offers up his own recipe ideas – for shepherd’s pie and rhubarb crumble – to the teachers, which does hint at an overly-prescriptive mindset.

But if some of the Conservative arrows find their mark, their own attitude to the state borders on incoherence. There are three significant weaknesses in their approach.

First, the Conservatives fail to recognize that, even if state action has not always delivered utopia, it has very often had a positive impact. It is certainly true to say that the significant redistributive policies pursued by Labour have failed, so far, to abolish poverty – but they have gone a long way to prevent the opening up of even greater inequality. Essentially, in terms of redistribution and equality, Labour has had to run harder simply to stand still. But the implication of Conservative thinking is that the government should stop running – the result of which would be more poverty, more inequality.

Second, on closer inspection the Conservatives are relying heavily on the state for many of their objectives. Gove and his colleagues have promised a personalized maternity nurse service, modeled on the Dutch kraamzorg ‘to help out in the days after childbirth’. His expansion of choice in education will require a boost in the supply of school places, with knock-on effects on funding. Cameron wants to use the tax system to reward marriage, to establish ‘a national programme for all 16-year-olds that helps teach them the responsibilities of adulthood’ and to give parents new legal rights to time off to care for their children. Lansley wants a dedicated secretary of state for public health, ‘proportionate regulation on advertising’ and standardized labeling on alcoholic drinks. The kind interpretation for the inconsistency is that the Conservatives are arguing for a different kind of state intervention: more local, softer-touch, more focused. The less kind one is that when it suits them, they are every bit as statist as Labour.

Third, there is an assumption in Cameron’s thinking that because state action can crowd out social responsibility (which is true; just think about ASBOs) so the removal of the state will result in the ‘rolling forward of society’. This is how Cameron himself described the philosophy last year: ‘We want to respond to what should be a new post-bureaucratic age, by decentralising power, by giving people more opportunity and control over their lives, by making families stronger and society more responsible.’ But the danger is that society refuses to roll forward – that families do not become stronger nor society more responsible simply because Brown gets out of the way. It is better not to nationalize responsibility – but once the deed is done it may not be easy to turn back the clock. Responsibility and social strength takes generations to build: what happens in the meantime?

To be fair, thoughtful Conservatives know that they have a lot more thinking to do on these issues and on the way in which state action fits within their desire for a ‘post-bureaucratic age’. Labour made political capital in the 1990s and early 2000s by portraying the Conservatives as wedded to the market and uncaring about disadvantage: now Cameron’s team are getting mileage from depicting Labour as wedded to the state and unable to tackle disadvantage. But soon they’ll have to move from political point-scoring to deeper thinking.
In the longer run, it may be that the political advantage will go to the party which first develops a healthy agnosticism about the state. The state, intrinsically, is neither good nor bad, neither liberating nor authoritarian. Progressive policies might result in a smaller state, conservative ones in a bigger state; it’s not its size but what you do with it that counts. Right now only the Liberal Democrats come close to a non-ideological view of the state, but we need to hear more from Clegg on his underlying philosophy before we can be sure.

One of the unfortunate legacies of 20th century politics is an obsession in both the main political parties with the state and a constant futile search for an overarching ‘theory of the state’. What is needed is for politicians of all stripes to be clear about their ultimate goals, and pragmatic about the possible role of the state in reaching them. It might help to reach back past the 20th century for guidance. Asked by a friend in 1847 to spell out his theory on the ‘province of government’, John Stuart Mill, wrote: ‘I doubt if much more can be done in a scientific treatment of the question than to point out a certain number of pro’s and a certain number of con’s of a more or less general application…leaving the balance to be struck in each particular case as it arises.’ Or as Tony Blair might have put it: ‘What matters is what works.’