This poll from PoliticsHome, showing which parties voters identify as "progressive", has been doing the rounds:
There's two points I want to make about it. First, as most of the commentary on the poll has pointed out, more people now believe the Conservatives are progressive than they do Labour. Unsurprisingly, the Progressive Conservatives at Demos are happy about this. The fact 22% of people don't accept the claim made by many on the left that "progressive conservativism" is an oxmoron and only 12% appear to agree with Peter Mandelson that Labour is the one true progressive party is, at least in part, a testament to the success of the project Demos and their former colleague Philip Blond are involved in of helping Cameron re-brand the Tories. The ProgCons at Demos point out they aren't being complacent, however, as there's much still to be done, not least the intellectual task of, as Max Wind Cowie puts it, "defining what it is that we mean by progressive conservatism in the first place."
A clearer more rigorous definition would indeed be helpful. I wouldn't call PC oxymoronic myself (mainly because, like James Graham, I think the term "progressive" has become an essentially meaningless one which adds almost nothing to political discussion), but it would be good to hear a little more from the Tories about what they mean when they invoke it. Talking about "localism" and open primaries as examples of progressive politics, as Osborne did at Demos last week, hardly helps. As it is, I remain to be convinced that "progressive conservatism" is a coherent and distinctive political ideology rather than an intellectual affection calculated to show the Tories are no longer the "nasty party". This is to say, I suspect that, instead of staking out an electoral position based on a set of practical proposals derived from ultimate values (which, I suggest, is how the relationship between political philosophy, policy and electoral positioning ought to work), the ProgCons are working backwards towards ultimate values from the electoral position they believe will be the most successful. Wind Cowie's reaction to the apparent success of Cameron's re-branding strategy - "It's working, now let's do the philosophy bit" - only confirms this sense.
The second point I want to make is that the poll underlines the bankruptcy of the party system. Over a third of the people interviewed don't see any party as progressive, while 22% identify "another party" as progressive. This means that 57% of people don't see either Labour, the Lib Dems, the Tories or the Greens as progressive with the majoirty of them believing that no party in the current system is progressive. Now, most of the people interviewed in the poll understand progressive to mean "reforming" and "modernising" (63% and 61% respectively) or some variant on this, rather than how the term is often employed by political commentators i.e. to mean "liberal" (16%) or "left-wing" (7%). It's only a small step from here to draw the conclusion that most people in this country don't see any of the main parties as reforming or modernising.
The political situation in this country, then, is that although most people believe in the need for thoroughgoing reform and modernisation (a recent YouGov poll, for example, showed 54 per cent agree with the statement that ‘this is a once-in-a-generation chance for a major overhaul to improve our democracy') they do not think our political system, with the existing party setup, is capable of delivering it. In this context we shouldn't be surprised to see more and more people switching off and disengaging from the formal political process and a continuing fall in turnout at elections.
The two main parties are still desperate to prove they're conscious of this and doing something about it. Open primaries are now in fashion, it seems, with the Tories holding one in Totnes and David Miliband proposing Labour do the same in the Guardian. Popular involvement in selecting candidates may help bring energy and ideas back into politics but ultimately it's just tinkering: only major constitutional reform, most importantly electoral reform, will make a difference and offer voters genuine choice and influence.
Labour and the Tories can bicker amongst themselves over who owns the progressive mantle, but when more people think that none of the parties are progressive than the combined number who say either of these two main parties are the debate is exposed for the trivial irrelevance it really is. Unless our political institutions show they are capable of reform following the next general election then we really could be heading for crisis point.
