{"id":86548,"date":"2025-10-10T07:02:45","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T06:02:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=86548"},"modified":"2025-10-10T07:02:45","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T06:02:45","slug":"talking-the-language-of-courage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2025\/10\/10\/talking-the-language-of-courage\/","title":{"rendered":"Talking the language of courage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p1\">In 2011, I wrote <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Courageous-State-Rethinking-Economics-Government\/dp\/1907720286\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><i>The Courageous State, <\/i><\/a>which was\u00a0a call for governments that act with purpose and confidence, not cowardice.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Fourteen years later, we still live with austerity, outsourcing and fear. I argue it\u2019s time to reclaim the language of democracy \u2014 to speak of courage, care, and common purpose.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">The words we choose decide the world we live in.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Watch now \u2014 and ask yourself: Do you want a courageous state?<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ipwqMPMbBsI?si=VG7lu_Zp4FLm-cUy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This is the audio version:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border: none; min-width: min(100%, 430px); height: 150px;\" title=\"The Cowardly State vs The Courageous State\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podbean.com\/player-v2\/?i=4k4mn-198b03c-pb&amp;from=pb6admin&amp;share=1&amp;download=1&amp;rtl=0&amp;fonts=Arial&amp;skin=f6f6f6&amp;font-color=auto&amp;logo_link=episode_page&amp;btn-skin=c73a3a\" width=\"100%\" height=\"150\" scrolling=\"no\" data-name=\"pb-iframe-player\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This is the transcript:<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>In 2011, I wrote a book called '<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Courageous-State-Rethinking-Economics-Government\/dp\/1907720286\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Courageous State<\/a>'.<\/p>\n<p>I remember the title being created. It was \u200aover supper one night. We'd been searching for an idea to bring together a whole series of arguments that I wanted to put into a book. And like most authors, we'd struggle to find the right language. And finding the right language is, in fact, what the whole book is, in a sense, about.<\/p>\n<p>The phrase, 'The Courageous State' came out suddenly over a matter of two or three minutes. We literally morphed through a series of ideas, and there it was. This had to be the title of the book, because what I did in this book was do something which I think is really important. I compared a cowardly state, which is what I thought we had in 2011 and which I still think we have now, with the vision of the state that I wanted, which is a courageous state which tries to deliver for people.<\/p>\n<p>Let's just stand back for a moment and understand why I wrote the book at the time that I did. What I'd done was witness, by then over 30 years, maybe 40 years, of \u200athe development of neoliberalism and had seen how it was already hollowing out government so that it was not delivering democracy and care in the way that I thought it should.<\/p>\n<p>What I believed was that it was time to recover the language that lets us believe quite literally in government again, because the whole purpose of neoliberalism is to undermine that belief.<\/p>\n<p>And of course, I wrote the book not that long after \u200athe 2008 crash, which had proved that markets cannot protect society. We'd \u200abeen building up to this point. We'd been told that the market was the solution to every problem that the government and we as a society faced, and then we discovered it wasn't.<\/p>\n<p>What I hoped was that in the immediate aftermath of that crash, governments would recover their nerve. And for a year or so, that looked to be the case. I was actually at the \u200aApril 2009 G20 Summit in London. I was in the room with world leaders. \u200aIt was an extraordinary privilege, and I just hoped that the air of confidence that they had at that moment would permeate out into the wider world.<\/p>\n<p>But by 2010 in the UK, we had the Conservatives in office, and we had \u200aGeorge Osborne talking about the need for austerity and how the state had to be put back in its box. \u200aWe have never recovered.<\/p>\n<p>And so I wrote the book, 'The Courageous State', to reclaim this vision of a world where government could act for the common good, where democracy could deliver governments that were anything but cowardly, and which were courageous enough to deliver for everyone in the countries that they governed, and cooperated with other governments to achieve the same goal around the world; the possibility of which was sort of hinted at in that meeting in April 2009, but which was never delivered.<\/p>\n<p>We got instead a continuation of the cowardly state.<\/p>\n<p>The \u200agovernment run by neoliberals that we had seen right from the time that Margaret Thatcher arrived in the UK and Ronald Reagan arrived in the USA.<\/p>\n<p>A government that outsourced its responsibility to private companies and \u200apretended that there was only taxpayers' money, so that money could run out on the government.<\/p>\n<p>And which treated services to be supplied by government as costs into which they claimed that money was poured with no benefit arising.<\/p>\n<p>And which ignored everything about rights.<\/p>\n<p>These cowardly governments \u200aused language to frame the appearance of the state. They talked about things like 'tax burdens' and 'spending cuts' and 'public waste' - words that were meant to demoralise democracy.<\/p>\n<p>In contrast, I envisaged a courageous state. \u200aA state that accepted its power and purpose. A state that is not constrained, but a creator of possibility within the economy and in the society which it manages. And which exists to secure fairness, well-being, and sustainability for everyone, and which would benefit everyone, whoever they were.<\/p>\n<p>Courage, then, in this sense meant speaking the truth about money and capacity and talking about how government could enable people and not markets.<\/p>\n<p>And language, as you can already see, matters absolutely critically to all of this. \u200aNeoliberalism won through because it used language like 'reform' when it actually meant cuts, and 'efficiency', when it actually meant layoffs, and 'freedom' when it actually meant deregulation for a few at cost to the many.<\/p>\n<p>Those were the things that I was pointing out in this book, and we still need to address those problems now. We still need the new language to make care sound like strength and not weakness. We need to change how people think about the words we use.<\/p>\n<p>The old language makes government sound like a problem. The old language of neoliberalism, that is.<\/p>\n<p>The new language must show that it is the solution.<\/p>\n<p>Old words in this sense - the neoliberal words - weaken belief in government.<\/p>\n<p>Spending is treated as if it is about waste.<\/p>\n<p>Deficit is treated as if it was just an accumulation of debt, when in fact it is the government injecting money into the economy to help it to function now and into the future, and accepting deposits from those with wealth to balance the cash flow if that is necessary.<\/p>\n<p>And \u200atax burden, as neoliberals call it, is nothing of the sort. It's the contribution that people are asked to make, and it's not a punishment. \u200aA contribution they're asked to make out of the money that the government has already spent on their behalf, because remember, the government spends on all our behalves.<\/p>\n<p>It supplies us with education for universal benefit. It provides us with healthcare for universal benefit. It provides us with the justice system. It provides us with essential services. Everything from emptying the bins to a fire service, and on and on, and all that money is spent for our benefit. \u200aSo when we pay it back, it isn't our money that we are returning. It is the government's money that it spent into the economy to deliver well-being for us.<\/p>\n<p>And the old words include things like red tape, as if protection were obstruction.<\/p>\n<p>New words, the ones that we need to use, are all about confidence and purpose.<\/p>\n<p>We should be investing in well-being. Spending that creates real value.<\/p>\n<p>We should be creating social balance sheets which measure health, security, education, and not just money, replacing, as a result, GDP is a measure of how well off we are.<\/p>\n<p>We should be talking \u200aabout shared contributions that recognise that tax builds the society we are all dependent upon, as well as cancelling the impact of government spending. Tax, remember, I think, is the most powerful instrument of government to shape the society in which we live, an idea I explored in another book, \u200a'The Joy of Tax'.<\/p>\n<p>And public safeguards should be the \u200athings that provide protection for people. That's not red tape. That's about ensuring that people can live safely in communities and on this planet into the future.<\/p>\n<p>Language is economic policy in disguise in that case. Change the words and you change what is possible.<\/p>\n<p>You talk about the government being unable to run out of money.<\/p>\n<p>You talk about the fact that real limits are resources, skills, and the environment.<\/p>\n<p>And you talk about the courage to use money to build well-being and not to feed scarcity and austerity.<\/p>\n<p>And the household analogy must go, of course, because you should be talking about government as what it really is, \u200athe agency that protects us all and manages on all our behalves and is therefore nothing like a household because that isn't what a household does, which has a micro view of the world about just the people living within it, when government is about the well-being of everyone in a state and very often, what's beyond it.<\/p>\n<p>So, you talk about services as the fabric of life. Health, education, housing, care, and security are not optional extras. \u200aThey are the infrastructure of a civilised society. Describing them as spending pressures diminishes our collective purpose. Courage means naming them as rights and guaranteeing them publicly.<\/p>\n<p>A courageous state is government in action. It speaks economic truth and not comforting myths. It takes responsibility rather than outsourcing. It invests for the long term and not for the next headline. It leads the transition to sustainability. It talks of government as us and not them. And when it sees a problem, it addresses it and doesn't walk away as cowardly governments do, \u200ajust in the way that I described in this book, and which still happens day in, day out.<\/p>\n<p>This all still matters, then. The book might be 14 years old, but if anything, the need for the arguments I made then are sharper than ever.<\/p>\n<p>I didn't imagine that populism would now be as popular as it is, filling the space where trust in government has collapsed, and where cynicism has grown because the language of care has disappeared. \u200aWe have to rebuild trust. We have to do so by speaking differently about government. The words we choose decide the world that we live in.<\/p>\n<p>The call then is to understand that government is how we care for each other at scale. To rebuild society, we must rebuild the language of the state. Courage is at the core of that. It begins with speaking truth. And courage, expressed through government, is how we thrive together, and that's why it's important.<\/p>\n<p>Do you want a courageous state?<\/p>\n<p>I had a vision for it, but would you like to live in a place where the government actually believed, not just in itself, but in you and in achieving your potential?<\/p>\n<p>There's a poll down below. Let us know.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Poll<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"polls-227\" class=\"wp-polls\">\n\t<form id=\"polls_form_227\" class=\"wp-polls-form\" action=\"\/Blog\/index.php\" method=\"post\">\n\t\t<p style=\"display: none;\"><input type=\"hidden\" id=\"poll_227_nonce\" name=\"wp-polls-nonce\" value=\"93ae1c792f\" \/><\/p>\n\t\t<p style=\"display: none;\"><input type=\"hidden\" name=\"poll_id\" value=\"227\" \/><\/p>\n\t\t<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>What kind of government do you want?<\/strong><\/p><div id=\"polls-227-ans\" class=\"wp-polls-ans\"><ul class=\"wp-polls-ul\">\n\t\t<li><input type=\"radio\" id=\"poll-answer-1039\" name=\"poll_227\" value=\"1039\" \/> <label for=\"poll-answer-1039\">A courageous state that invests in people<\/label><\/li>\n\t\t<li><input type=\"radio\" id=\"poll-answer-1040\" name=\"poll_227\" value=\"1040\" \/> <label for=\"poll-answer-1040\">A cautious state that avoids risk<\/label><\/li>\n\t\t<li><input type=\"radio\" id=\"poll-answer-1041\" name=\"poll_227\" value=\"1041\" \/> <label for=\"poll-answer-1041\">A small state that leaves it to markets<\/label><\/li>\n\t\t<li><input type=\"radio\" id=\"poll-answer-1042\" name=\"poll_227\" value=\"1042\" \/> <label for=\"poll-answer-1042\">A new kind of cooperative state<\/label><\/li>\n\t\t<\/ul><p style=\"text-align: center;\"><input type=\"button\" name=\"vote\" value=\"   Vote   \" class=\"Buttons\" onclick=\"poll_vote(227);\" \/><\/p><p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"#ViewPollResults\" onclick=\"poll_result(227); return false;\" title=\"View Results Of This Poll\">View Results<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n\t<\/form>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"polls-227-loading\" class=\"wp-polls-loading\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-polls\/images\/loading.gif\" width=\"16\" height=\"16\" alt=\"Loading ...\" title=\"Loading ...\" class=\"wp-polls-image\" \/>&nbsp;Loading ...<\/div>\n\n<hr \/>\n<p><b>Comments\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n<p>When commenting, please take note of this blog\u2019s comment policy,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/about\/comments\/\">which is available here<\/a>. Contravening this policy will result in comments being deleted before or after initial publication at the editor\u2019s sole discretion and without explanation being required or offered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 2011, I wrote The Courageous State, which was\u00a0a call for governments that act with purpose and confidence, not cowardice. Fourteen years later, we still<br \/><a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2025\/10\/10\/talking-the-language-of-courage\/\"><em> Read the full article&#8230;<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96,14,141,204,35,16,147,118,224,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatives","category-corruption","category-courageous-state","category-economic-justice","category-economics","category-ethics","category-inequality","category-labour","category-neoliberalism","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86548"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86596,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86548\/revisions\/86596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}