Policies change people’s lives, but they also change people. The last half century of Conservative party strategy has been shaped by this insight. In this they are no different to neoliberal thinkers and parties across the world.
Despite their rhetoric of ‘choice’, individual freedom and limited state intervention, it is the right who have worked most consciously to construct a citizenry in their desired image.
It is time to learn from those insights, and repurpose them for a liberatory and egalitarian politics, before the opportunity is missed. If the left were to be this ambitious, it would involve looking at public policy in a new way – through the lens of how it shapes and transforms consciousness.
