There’s something of motherhood and apple pie about David Cameron’s big idea, the ‘big society’ to the extent that Labour could be in danger of saying, ‘Yes, we agree but …’ It will be how that sentence is concluded that is important. In this, one danger would be to accept the siren overtures of those like Phillip Blond, alleged father of the idea and director of the thinktank ResPublica.

He told a breakout session at the Progress annual conference that the new centre ground of politics would coalesce around Labour and Tory views of the ‘big society’. For this reason, he said, he would like the idea ‘depoliticised’.

Blond was more emollient than he was on his last Progress outing – the February seminar at the House of Commons – when, he told us, the 1945 Labour government had ‘nationalised society’ and the state was ‘malign’. This time, anti-state rhetoric was abandoned and the ‘big society’ was about empowerment, participatory democracy and, no doubt, rescuing drowned puppies, had we had more detail.

The most robust retort to Blond came from Maurice, the newly ennobled Lord, Glasman, and Blue Labour’s onlie begetter, for whom this Tory notion was more serious than stealing Labour’s clothes: it looted the party’s very history. This was deep in free associations, cooperatives and trade unions, challenges to the domination of the money ethic. The ‘big society’, said Glasman, using a word not much heard these days, was ‘socialism’.

Paul Brant, deputy leader of Liverpool council (which has withdrawn as a ‘big society’ test bed due to the cuts) said that the ‘big society’ is not, as Tories imply, cost free: services, which do not make a profit, need public funding even if run by volunteers.

Tessa Jowell, who holds the shadow cabinet brief for the ‘big society’, spoke of the need to update our understanding of ‘the inalienable responsibilities of the state’, while pointing out that people were, for the present, being offered less from public services but more was being demanded of them.

Oddly, practical examples of giving localities power – money left over from the Olympic budget to prettify parts of the Olympic area (Jowell) and hanging baskets in deprived areas (Blond) – entirely overlooked Labour’s New Deal for Communities, which offer power and cash. But, with so much else, that’s now gone through the coalition’s shredder. Which is one reason to steer clear of depoliticising the ‘big society’.

How can it stand up to the juggernaut of cuts? To take an example. Catholic social welfare charities in England spend £170 million a year, employ 6,000 staff and have 9,000 volunteers working with 800,000 people. Until last week’s High Court judgement, Birmingham Council planned £212 million of an eventual £300 million cuts that would cost 7,000 jobs. Thus, one authority’s actions can cancel the entire charitable effort of just one part of the voluntary sector.

Glasman says that key to Labour’s approach to the ‘big society’ has to be about the redistribution of assets and power. It is true that the ‘big society’ as a cure-all for social malaise and oppressive public services, like libraries, obscures the maldistribution of wealth, inequality and structural unfairness which marks our society, while he second half of Cameron’s equation (big society, small state) is also being overlooked.

For all these reasons, to depoliticise the ‘big society’, rather than develop a robust defence of public services, while reclaiming Labour’s historic principles, would be implicitly to accept the coalition’s terms of engagement.