Tom Griffin (London, OK): We are all progressives now, suggests Steve Richards today in an Independent column 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 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).
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.
