The Enabling State

In today’s Times James Purnell (Labour Pensions Minister) and Jim Murphy (Labour Welfare Minister) emerge from the deep undergrowth to do that rarest of things: advance the New Labour third way ideology. It’s a very strange piece of writing, lumpy and vague and non-specific in all the vital places, but it does shine a light into an almost completely unknown world.

“The Central Principle of this next phase of government should be the extension of power to the people… it is an egalitarian principle… it calls for an enabling State rather than a shrinking one.”

“But the old social democratic approach, which saw the State providing broadly the same service to everyone, will not be enough, either. People today have different aspirations from each other, and face different barriers, so public services must meet different needs. Public services need to be personal.”

“[The] enabling State gives power to individuals and communities, and trusts them to know how to use it. This means government doing everything it can to help people get on, and overcome the barriers they face.”

“Life chances should not be inherited at birth. That means an unrelenting focus on education.”

“But we should also be aiming to stretch those with particular talents. We could pilot Talent Budgets, where secondary-school pupils are given funds to develop their skill –whether for an individual to take extra music or sports lessons, or for groups of young people to pool their budgets to set up a business or get extra tuition to go to University.” [Yes, they really did start a paragraph with the word ‘but’]

"Our aim would be an aspiration society. We could consider the model of the Climate Change Bill – setting a bold goal, independently monitored, which then requires government action… The goal could be, as in Denmark, to ensure that children have the same chances, whatever their parents’ wealth.”

“This would be the beginning of the next era of change in British politics.”

“Social responsibility is an important means- everyone agrees the voluntary sector is important. But it is not enough. We need a clear goal- an aspiration society- and an effective method- an enabling State.”


By the end of the article, I felt like I'd just been assaulted by someone with one of those foam hammers you can buy for kids- slightly annoyed and wondering what the hell these people are trying to achieve. First of all, the English on display here is lamentable. No educated person in Britain should be this bad at explaining ideas. I imagine thousands of text messages will be sent today in clearer and more understandable language than our authors manage. Government ministers have few core tasks. First among them is clearly understanding the purpose of their departments, and steering them to the greatest extent possible toward the effective achievement of that purpose. Would you trust these two intellectual fluffy bunnies to clearly understand the purpose of a lamppost, let alone a very large and massively expensive Government department?

But now to the content: is there a genuine vision here?

We have a number of animating principles jockeying for prime position- The extension of power to the people, the enabling state, public services that are personal, life chances not inherited at birth, and the aspiration society.

First, let’s consider the extension of power to the people. The authors say “[The extension of power to the people] is an egalitarian principle… And it calls for an enabling State rather than a shrinking one. The Cameron thesis is that if the State withdraws, then miraculously the people are granted power. But the opposite is true- if the State withdraws, then those with power keep it, and those without fall further behind.” As usual I like to look at real-life cases. More people try to get into the United States every year than try to get into the EU and every other country in the world combined. Why? Because the state is largely absent from most peoples lives. They don’t take much of your money, and largely confine themselves to the core activities of a state as defined by the US constitution 230 years ago. Those core activities are the ones which only states can do because they require resources at the whole-community level. ALL OTHER ACTIVITIES can be done by individuals or communities so the state refrains from intruding. These two Labour bozo’s want the British state to intrude further and further into national life, eating up functions and charging us for doing them. Their model is not the United States, its Denmark. Actually, the Soviet Union would be much closer to the final position. Make your own conclusions.

Second, is there a genuine idea in ‘The Enabling State’? Enabling is an interesting concept. Think of International Development Aid as an obvious piece of Labour ‘enabling’. In theory, rich countries give money to ‘developing’ countries, who spend our aid on building hospitals, universities, roads, factories and fresh-water facilities for their people. In practice, rich countries give money to ‘developing’ countries, whose fifteen top ministers squirrel away our money in Swiss banks and live out their long lives in splendid mansions. The ninety-five million other residents of those ‘developing’ countries gradually get poorer and hungrier and angrier. This Labour government has spent very large sums indeed picking winners in ‘developing’ countries with virtually nothing to show for it other than some very happy Monaco residents. Picking winners is a job governments do very badly. But that’s because the whole process by which some people succeed and other fail is a mystery to Labour and always has been. Labour chose the conspiracy theory of wealth very early on, which burdened successful people with great opprobrium as ‘oppressor capitalists’ as soon as they were successful. They loved the unsuccessful, and trumpeted them as the only virtuous people. In America, by contrast, failure is met with its due opprobrium, and successes hailed and touted; and look at the difference in results. Whose ‘best practice’ should we copy?

Third, Public Services that are personal. I can’t actually imagine what this means in practice, other than employing a lot more people in the public sector, and descending ever further into the minutiae of peoples lives and ‘fixing’ them the government way. We already have vast tracts of this kind of activity. Anybody who has followed the comical Training and Enterprise Councils/Learning and Skills Councils progress will know that billions and billions of pounds can disappear during the pointless endeavor of ‘forcing’ people into particular sectors of the economy. Most Public Services are unnecessary to begin with. Gold-plating the unnecessary is a task worthy of Sisyphus. A logical approach would keep removing functions from the public sector until only those things which truly require whole-nation resources to achieve remain. Margaret Thatcher started the process; who will finish her work?

Fourth, life chances not inherited at birth. This ‘principle’ is a perfect example of ideas which have no validity except as a means of renouncing what came before. Labour people have to revile ‘life chances inherited at birth’ because they believe that this terrible principle ruled the world before 1948 (or perhaps 1848). It’s a straw man- Britain never had a strong attachment to this principle as evidenced by the vast number of prominent, successful Britons down the ages born into meager circumstances. For every rich and important man in British public life who is a scion of a great landed family I can show you ten who were born to Mr. and Mrs. Smith from Watford; and not just in 2007, but in 1907 and 1707 and back into the mists of time. Henry the Eighth was the son of a usurping Welshman. Oliver Cromwell came from an obscure East Anglian family. William Shakespeare’s father was an illiterate tradesman. I could go on… Perhaps the French stifled public life by requiring a pedigree before you could found a business or get a cushy government job, but we didn’t. The simple fact is that life chances are mainly determined at birth, very often because a particular set of genes combines very well with another set of genes and the recipient gets a head start on all his or her peers because of it. That’s how the world is. But given a fair crack, most of us can improve our circumstances by study and effort and work. And nobody needs to ‘enable’ us, just avoid getting in our way.

Also, by slightly changing the angle at which this ‘principle’ is viewed, I could probably get a large percentage of the public to support the principle of ‘life chances inherited at birth’. Lets describe it thus: wouldn’t it be great if every one of us inherited a great societal and personal bequeath of cultural and material wealth, so that our subsequent life was that much richer and more satisfying? Wouldn’t it be great if we started our lives with a great stock of personal confidence and positivity? Hard to argue against isn’t it? And that’s what I’d call ‘The American Way’.

Lastly, we come to the most amusing of the New Labour great ideas- the aspiration society. I find myself imagining “a bold goal, independently monitored, which then requires government action” in practice. In some vast government building, a voice comes over the tannoy “Have we met the Aspirational people production target for the fourth quarter yet? I want every droid working at full speed! Heil Gordon!” We already have an ‘aspiration’ society- there’s this thing called the Maslowean hierarchy of needs. As a person meets basic needs, they naturally begin thinking about the needs at the next level and trying to have them satisfied. Every single person on the planet ‘aspires’ in this way, unless they never start down the path to self-actualization in the first place. Regarding the latter, more in a moment.

Successful societies allow for individuals to rise as high as their drive and effort take them. They do this by NOT GETTING IN THE WAY. They have institutions which determinedly respect the individual and do not in the main intrude themselves into the domain of the individuals choice. Labour have almost completely ruined the British set of institutions which for many generations served the nation while not stifling and blocking the individual. Even the poorest people in Britain now have great forests of legislation determining the starting conditions for any entrepreneurial activity they might want to start, for instance, and a vast array of different bodies and bureaucracies to oversea their activity once started. The day of showing up at the town square and selling people things from a little cart are completely gone. Try it in Britain and see how many state representatives show up to ‘enable’ your activities.

The other reason I find this grand idea so humorous is that in New Labour Britain the state has taken it upon itself to provide the base needs in the Maslowean hierarchy for everybody, even foreigners just off the plane. For those who are very lethargic and lazy, this means they need never exert any effort on their own behalf. Their children are born into a world where absolutely no effort or personal responsibility is in required, and a dynasty is born. The welfare state removes aspiration from the radar of many, many of our least bothered citizens. In America, if you don’t at least get your ass out of bed and go fill coffee cups at the local eatery, you don’t have food or a house. The conditions are set for people to start the process of self-actualization. But lets not copy that ‘best practice’!

A few last comments… all through this article the word state is capitalized. Why? The last time I checked only words like God and Great Britain were capitalized… you know, words that conjure up our most respected and valued cultural icons. Early in this article, the authors provide a potted history of Britain since the second world war. See my previous posts about completely distorted and threadbare historical narratives… ‘Our history might have been very different if we had confronted the Empire illusion, shaped the European Union from the start and reformed our economy in the way Germany and Japan were rebuilding theirs.” With unmitigated twaddle like that, its hard to know where to start. How many historical fallacies can you fit into one sentence?

Overall, I’d say there’s very little here that an old Labour dinosaur would not agree with, once the strange language was translated into actual English. Socialism= good. Capitalism= bad. People born with a double-barrelled surname=bad. Scruffy nere-do-well living in Camden squat=good. Aspiration= good. Real-world tested means of enabling aspiration= bad. It turns out there is no third way. Just the second way with a facelift.