Good stuff from Tim Horton, research director of the Fabians in the Guardian:
There are huge challenges for the left in thinking about the future role of the state. Our ageing society will require more services than can be funded simply out of taxation, requiring tough trade-offs. Meanwhile, markets can provide many services they couldn't in 1945, challenging government's role as provider.
Glasman's Blue Labour project emphasises the role of identity and belonging in politics and has enriched Labour's conversation about its future. But it won't achieve its aims if it gets narrowed into a fixation with localism and voluntarism.
Yes, our attachment to institutions is often local and informal. But from the BBC to the NHS to the RAF, many of our favourite institutions are national and central. And, yes, place is important in our identity. But a nation is a place too. So Glasman is right that Labour must speak to feelings of belonging. But this will clearly be a politics that incorporates, not jettisons, the state.
Absolutely true.
I think a lot more of us should be saying, a lot more often, that we believe in the vital role of the state in our economy.
It doesn't mean we don't like the private sector: it's vital too. Essential even, but then so too is the state. And people are frightened to say it. Good for the Fabians for still saying so.
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And following on from that, it means realising that ‘the national’ is the important level for action and resistance, which in turn means that ‘national’ is a pragmatic reality, not a dirty word – though you’ve certainly tried to avoid using it.
You have to refer in the end to nation state for definition, otherwise there is confusion with component ‘states’ of national entities.
Why is it the only level? Local action can be overridden, esp by having the budget carpet pulled away, as we have seen. And there are no possiblities for democracy or action or resistance with the corporate-driven EU institution, rather unaccountability and corruption.
So we come back to the national level. Lets get on with it, without elite Left elitist language manipulation.
Why do we need a state? To destroy other states like Libya and Iraq? No thanks. I’ll take anarchy over state any day.
Please enlighten me- what is the “State”? Just the latest bunch of cronies who have hauled themselves up the sticky power pole?
Let us think which countries “celebrate” the state, to use your word – Cuba, North Korea…actually, let’s not.
As with several of the comments here the sheer stupidity of such a comment as this says a great deal about you
It’s not chance that the post war consensus both built unrivalled wealth and was based on at least 40% of GDP being state generated
Yes – I mean generated