[...] this month Anthony Barnett on ourKingdom asked whether the left was really brewing with new ideas and thinking, in response to Martin Bright in the New [...]

Goodness - a debate about whether, and when, ideas are ideas!

I'll readily confess first that I made liberal use of Anthony's free pass for ideas which may not be part of the Brown government's programme (yet?).

I also referred to events and initiatives as ideas. But this is because in each case, ideas lie behind these events and initiatives, and a set of ideas often take decisive form only through being brought into being, or through shifts in the historical context.

- on post-Suez, Greenstock is saying little that many have not said for years. The fact that *he* is saying it *at this point in time* makes it an idea whose pragmatism is novel, and which has some prospect of taking decisive form. Get him on a platform with the unions and the Faslane lot, and feel the ontological dislocation...

- Avaaz.org is an initiative which seeks to realise ideas of global citizenship and realtime, multi-issue mass activism. The UK progressive networks are seeking to build new pieces of civic political architecture which are based in the thinking some people have been doing for several years now.

Tony is right about the pivotal issue of egalitarianism, and the broader blind spot this introduces for the modern left. This needs to be overcome. I think the strong push on child poverty -- if followed through with action, which may also involve funding, and a test of the civic duty of higher-rate taxpayers... - is a promising idea, and one I forgot to mention before. A more serious international development policy including trade justice would perhaps be even more important.

Governance & services centred on citizens and communities may sound like rhetoric, but goes a hell of a long way beyond the abstract internalisation of effects, not least in its dimension of collective democratic choice.

Beyond participatory budgeting, a more serious localism based in devolution to strategic local government - while not entirely novel - has been put on the agenda by thinkers on both sides of the fence, from the Young Foundation to Policy Exchange, as well as by the democratic reform gang (Power, Unlock etc). There are a few fresh ideas here, and a current of energy. This was another one I missed, perhaps surprisingly given how much time I spent crafting a progressive, egalitarian argument for local variation last year. (Buried in a submission to the buried Lyons report.)

Oh, here's another one: solidaristic individualism! (take Pledgebank, FixMyStreet...). The speed and ease of building social infrastructure today means that ideas are all the more likely to be transformed into practical initiatives immediately, rather than debated in scholarly journals.

I am concerned though about the absence of other respondents to Anthony's challenge. And I acknowledge much of the diagnosis. The danger is that without a vibrant current of serious and progressive ideas in society, we outsource our future to those who will tinker bureaucratically... and ultimately, to the next wave of conservative radicals.

The Freidmanite right set the US and UK domestic policy agenda between the end of the seventies and today. This was done with a program of ideas, a complete system, that could derive policy response from first principles.

There is one whole part of the intellectual left that has attacked the notion of a "first principle". For all the excitement and intellectual vitality involved in deconstruction, one has to recognise that its sophisticated hyper-skepticism does not easily get you out to take your slippers off.

Then - I return to this point - the objective assault that environmental constraint and particularism place on an egalitarian world view means that the slippered, deconstructive view is actually much more comfortable: it makes a virtue of the difficulty of principle-led policy responses.

Our greatest egalitarian challenges are trans-national; nations have so far been the bodies able to deliver complex equalities. Is "state stewardship" really the answer here? The environmental constraint is a real test-case: whatever the state-level politics, there will need to be a profound, personal change in our attitudes to a well-realised life.

I would put "voluntary simplicity", and its elaboration in politics, as central to an egalitarianism for tomorrow. I think that the place of a public sphere drops out of this both instrumentally and as a part of the kingdom of ends.

But equally it can become individual solidarity... Meanwhile the overall outcome, of shaping a wider egalitarian system, needs state-stewarded collective action (international, national, local).

I think there's nothing wrong with individualism provided the settings of public space, solidarity and collective action are also strong. That's our egalitarian challenge - and it's *primarily* one of construction rather than restraint.

You may also be interested to know that this is a conversation one of the new cabinet members was capable of having with me some months ago, before his "elevation". Anthony's theme about thinking politicians is an important one... But we need to keep them thinking!

Looking forward to debating the larger, global reasons for the difficulties facing the left, here just want to come back on Tony's comment on Paul's point one:

>> 1. popular sovereignty and codification through a popular national debate.

Tony: "What is the idea here? We have been a democracy for a while - what idea is there here that has more than wonkish appeal?"

The idea here - the thinking if you will - is threefold. First, in the UK we have an especially undemocratic democracy, not just because of the crisis of disengagement and lack of voting, grossly unfair election outcomes etc, but structurally because sovereignty is vested in the political elite (parliament) and not citizens through our own constitution. So, (1) the thinking is that the UK is not an unquestionable democracy but could be one.

Second, will this appeal? You bet it will, when it is on offer. It is part of the backwardness of political imagination in this country (meaning literally a stuck-in-the-pastness as well as a hysterical, teenage longing for shock-horror fed by the media) that the call for our own constitution is seen as either a revolution or boring, ie unless the trouserless masses are demanding it in the streets there is close to zero interest. I recall how London journalists were sent up to Edinburgh when the Scottish Parliament was created to sniff out the cordite and they reported back in disappointment that all was calm and life was proceeding as normal. But that was the whole point! A profound change had begun that will take a generation to work through to create a better life, it was not about a Year Zero. So (2) this has a broad modern appeal.

Third, the last can become first. While part of getting a written constitution will simply be a catching up, a 'normalisation' of the UK/England, the country's exceptional and deep parliamentary culture with its history of rights and rules and a capacity for inventiveness will create the opportunity for something new - the first open constitutional convention in a wealthy society with high broadband interconnectivity is going to create a practical democracy that will be pathbreaking. So, (3) this is not just a matter of better administration although it needs to promise this, it is also a matter of becoming ourselves with much less dependency and subordination. The term for this is self-determination, that core concept which joins democracy and nationalism, but of a better kind. Quite a thought, surely.

Anthony

nice elaboration. thanks, paul.

i like solidaristic individualism as a concept - though wait for it to be taken over by right-radicals: think of its closeness to the Victorian friendly societies that are so dear to right-liberals as a model of pre-welfarist redistribution.

but note that it concedes individualism ... this seems to me to be dangerous for any position seeking to make public space a good in itself.

Tony

Paul - allow me to play avocatus diabolis with your list.

>> 1. popular sovereignty and codification through a popular national debate

What is the idea here? We have been a democracy for a while - what idea is there here that has more than wonkish appeal?

>> 2. Governance and service delivery centred on citizens and communities, rather than simply on the consumer or the provider.

This sounds to me an extension of the 30 year-old attitude to public provision, pioneered by the right and adopted by most of the left, that efficient provision should design mechanisms that internalise all effects. This seems like a mild re-branding of an idea of the right.

>> 3. Participatory budgeting. (OK, it’s old hat in Brazil but new here, even if some of us have been pushing it for years. And yes, let’s see if it’s real or not.)

Yes but ... this usually implies localism, which much of the left is still very uncomfortable with: too much localism means too little nation-level solidarity, after all.

>> 4. Everyday democracy. (One of Demos’s high points.)

Can you explain the idea?

>> 5. Counter to Mike Small, I’d say the recent “post-Suez” conversion of pillars of the diplomatic establishment like Jeremy Greenstock to a future independent of the US, and without the expensive folly of Trident, is massively significant. It may not be particularly left, or dramatically new, but it has at least a shot of influencing this Labour Government, and creating some epochal new facts of foreign policy.

6. Initial moves, from Compass and the democratic reform movement to Sunny Hundal’s efforts, to get some real progressive online politics going in this country, and to build new kinds of pluralistic civic coalitions.

7. Avaaz.org - but then, I would say that. (And we’re about the emerging global progressive consensus, not the British left.)

The last 3 are not ideas. They are events, initiatives, currents. But they don't in themselves elaborate a project.

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I think Anthony's point stands, and I am still trying to get my view of this clear. I think that the acephalous state of the left has to do with the real challenges of interpreting egalitarianism in our globalising world. A real commitment to equality precludes easy (or politically felicitous) solutions to problems of migration, environment, religious identity, national identity .... in fact, to the sorts of problems that we are now frequently confronted with. Being left 30 years ago, it was possible to adopt a coherent optimism on all of these. Today, and if you keep your commitment to equality, it is all much harder. For me, the scale-falling statement of this difficulty comes in Gerry Cohen's "If You're an Egalitarian, how Come You're So Rich?": it tells the intellectual autobiography of the move from a pretty thorough-going and thoughtful Marxism to its explosion by the problems of identity and environment. This is not a problem that arises from Marxism per se, but from the confrontation of egalitarianism with the pains of globalisation.

So if there's a problem, why no ideas? Because the intellectual consequences of the confrontation are painful, and it is easier to get stuck in practical issues. But it won't set anyone's head or heart alight.

There's very little new under the sun, Anthony. But challenge accepted. If you count re-conceptions of old ideas, I'd say:

1. On the constitutional front, popular sovereignty and codification through a popular national debate. (Idea, not government policy yet. Ming was interesting on this the other day.)

2. Governance and service delivery centred on citizens and communities, rather than simply on the consumer or the provider.

3. Participatory budgeting. (OK, it's old hat in Brazil but new here, even if some of us have been pushing it for years. And yes, let's see if it's real or not.)

4. Everyday democracy. (One of Demos's high points.)

5. Counter to Mike Small, I'd say the recent "post-Suez" conversion of pillars of the diplomatic establishment like Jeremy Greenstock to a future independent of the US, and without the expensive folly of Trident, is massively significant. It may not be particularly left, or dramatically new, but it has at least a shot of influencing this Labour Government, and creating some epochal new facts of foreign policy.

6. Initial moves, from Compass and the democratic reform movement to Sunny Hundal's efforts, to get some real progressive online politics going in this country, and to build new kinds of pluralistic civic coalitions.

7. Avaaz.org - but then, I would say that. (And we're about the emerging global progressive consensus, not the British left.)

(I didn't say we've got any of this right yet, but the ideas are indeed getting stronger! And I didn't even get into the weeds, or cover it all.)

The Left's best ideas (none of which have anything or will have aything to do with Labour) are:

* the dis-establishment of the British State

* the rejection of Trident

* the drive for renewables and the rejection of nuclear power

In a sense these are not 'new' ideas but they are being opposed by the powerfull and those who represent elite rule. They are also intimately linked and will lead to a profoundly different position for the UK in global politics. One where Scotland is not a nuclear dump littered with military bases, and Britain doesn't put an extraordinary amount of energy into maintaining an unsustainable position as a world power.

[...] | Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I threw down a gauntlet earlier this month and asked: where is the thinking on the left? Compared to the energy and vitality of right-wing blogland it seemed to me that the left was [...]