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# The progressive consensus
- URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/the-progressive-consensus/
- Published: 2008-09-12T11:09:28.000Z
- Updated: 2019-02-14T22:41:37.000Z
- Author: Tom Griffin
- Tags: #en, #Migrated, #Import 2026-04-09 18:41

**Tom Griffin (London,** [**OK**](https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom)**):** We are all progressives now, suggests Steve Richards today in an [Independent column](http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/steve-richards/steve-richards-we-are-all-progressive-these-days-927030.html?ref=opendemocracy.net) which interrogates the meaning of this increasingly popular political label:

*There is no escape from it. Gordon Brown seeks to form a progressive consensus. David Cameron claims the Conservatives are the progressive party. Nick Clegg is a progressive. David Miliband is one too. So is Ken Livingstone. Tony Blair is a progressive. So is Ed Balls. George Osborne is also one. I could go on. Apparently we are all progressives now.* 
  
*Lacking clear definition the word is easily applied without too many questions asked. For the Conservatives it serves to decontaminate a brand previously seen as nasty and extreme. Labour leaders have used the term to purge echoes of their party's past.*

One aspect of the word which Richards doesn't consider is its [historicist](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism?ref=opendemocracy.net#Karl%5FPopper) implications. This may be precisely what made it attractive in the first place to post-Marxist Blairites who had abandoned the ideology of socialist revolution, but not their view of themselves as the midwives of history (a narrative which resurfaced [in relation to Iraq](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/may/10/foreignpolicy.comment?ref=opendemocracy.net)).

On this view, to be a progressive is to be a moderniser, with modernity being seen primarily in economic terms. But economics is a science of means and not of ends, and economic progress is in itself only an instrumental, value free goal. It may underpin a pragmatic consensus, but it cannot provide the substantive values on which a democracy depends.

The progressive label should invite the rejoinder 'progress towards what end'? Too often, as Richards' article implies, it is simply a way of avoiding that fundamental question.