Wednesday 23 March 2011

Blue Labour

People have to take responsibility for their lives but they can't be responsible without having more power says Maurice Glasman in an interesting Analysis program for Radio 4 on Blue Labour. This is the lunacy of the Thatcher and Labour years - we'll do everything for you, you're not going to have any assets, you're not going to have any power at work, you're not going to earn enough to feed your family, but you've got to be a responsible, patriotic citizen. He continues, so what we want is a redistribution of power to people where they live and where they work - and that requires statecraft, it requires the state standing back and trusting people to sort out their problems together.

Sounds like Big Society to me. But in an extraordinary passage he adds I want to return to the Tudor state model where there's a conception of social order, a balance of interests, where there's statecraft, where there's robust, autonomous institutions that defend the good.