A liberal society: addressing our disconnected society

I posted earlier about our society and the crisis that it is in. I do not mean this in the way David Cameron means broken Britain. I mean it on a deeper level – that it does not serve the majority and does not promote the majority fulfilling their potential. I believe that we need to start making a case for what a liberal society looks like, more so than we have before. I started painting a picture of this in my last post but I would like to put this video up which I think gives a very good message about what a different society could be if we addressed some of the more difficult issues we like to ignore. It is not an orthodox political video but it is well worth watching:

A political grassroots movement which will take us to a new era of politics: Where do the Lib Dems stand?

This is an article I wrote which was originally published in The Liberator January 2011 Edition and I am posting it here for those who may be interested:

If you look closely enough you will see the beginnings of a significant shift taking place in the way public services and, ultimately, government is run. It is a distinctively liberal shift and one which will define politics and political parties, yet the natural party for liberal ideas is being eclipsed by the natural party of the status quo.

The debate has been ongoing for a while and has resulted in the Conservative Party Manifesto ‘An Invitation to Join the Government of Britain’ with their flagship policy of the Big Society. David Cameron says “the Big Society is about a huge culture change… It’s about liberation –the biggest, most dramatic redistribution of power from elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street” (Big Society speech, 19.7.10). The problem is not what he says but the fact that he is in the Conservative Party as this is a premature debate for the Tories who have found the whole idea difficult to swallow with some in the party going as far as to say ‘the big society is bollocks’ (the Guardian, 20.4.10).

People have sensed change in the air and tried to get in on the act leading the recent debate for reform of public services and government administration in many different directions: The easycouncil in Barnet, the John Lewis style Council in Lambeth and now the ‘virtual’ council in Suffolk. However, the politicians are a very long way behind what is already taking place and these initiatives only serve to show how the parties are not in a position to champion this fundamental change.

The Old Paradigm

Governance and public administration have periodically gone through fundamental changes from citizens being seen as subjects and government as rulers, to citizens as voters and government as trustees and, more recently, citizens as customers and government as managers. As citizens are seen as customers of services managed by government agencies the debate has been around how to make these services more responsive to the needs of the people. Government has therefore sought inspiration from business management practices to provide government agencies with better tools for policy implementation and tried to move decision making closer to the service recipients. This has resulted in the choice agenda which all political parties are signed up to.

Services based on choice provide people with the essential power of ‘exit’ where we, as citizens, are able to exit from one service and enter another. The criticism of this has been that this restricts and discourages the productive political voices of the people as they use the passive power of ‘exit’ rather than the progressive power of their ‘voice’ to improve services. This approach therefore ignores citizens as active individuals with an important role to play in the community. This is neatly put by the Cabinet Office when they said “user choice is an effective instrument for promoting quality, responsiveness, efficiency and equity in public services. It is in many cases more effective than alternatives, such as voice mechanisms” (Case for User Choice in Public Services, 4.5.07). But the exercise of our voice, the need to be heard in a more fundamental way, is exactly what people are beginning to want.

The New Paradigm

We are formal owners of the state by all democratic and business criteria. Yet we are told by service providers what we are entitled to and in what way. We, as citizens, may be unwilling and even incapable of becoming practical owners of the state, yet people are waking up to the idea that they no longer want to continue to be treated as simple voters or customers.

The political leadership have been slow to respond to this change, however, it has not stopped attempts at creating it. Citizen’s Contracts have been drawn up, Citizen’s Conventions have been put on, and Crowdsourcing projects have been set up in attempts to give people a voice. Wiki’s have been used to draft laws, websites have been used to collect user feedback, and TimeBanking has been developed to harness the public’s will to contribute to their community. Companies have been developed who specialise in citizen involvement, public funds have been given to service users to spend how they see fit and public services are being co-created by government agencies and citizens together.

This is a fundamental difference to how citizens are considered by the state. They are no longer customers but partners who have a wealth of ideas, experience and knowledge which can improve services; they are partners who can contribute to the running, monitoring and development of services; they are partners who are essential in how the community works for each other.

The new paradigm will be collaboration between government agencies and citizens as well as other social players important in the development of services such as non-governmental organisations.  The new paradigm provides choice and voice as important mechanisms where the Cabinet Office does not question whether voice was a good idea but see it as the most important element as citizens are equal partners.

So where are the political parties in this debate?

And this is where the Conservative Party Manifesto comes in. It is the right message at the right time but this debate for the Conservative Party is embryonic. This is why they have a council advocating an easycouncil, which is about as far from a collaborative way of working as you can possibly get, while a virtual council potentially removes meaningful partnership as services are one step further removed from those with power. There is little in conservative thought that guides the Conservative Party towards collaboration and so David Cameron says unapologetically “you can call it liberalism… I call it the Big Society” (Big Society speech, 19.7.10) yet the rest of the party are still in the old paradigm looking at more ‘responsive’ services for ‘customers’.

Labour’s authoritarianism left a wide gap for the Tories to become the party of collective social action and it prevented them from producing any meaningful policies which would create collaboration with citizens. The Tories have a flagship policy of collective action where collaboration is a large element, yet only some of the party believe it is the right approach and others have said that the reason they don’t have all the answers is because we are in the ‘valley of nobody knows’ (Big Society Blog, 31.5.10). Which leaves the Liberal Democrats. Nick Clegg has stated “what he calls the Big Society is what I would call the Liberal Society” (Demos speech, 16.7.10) and Paddy Ashdown has said “David Cameron’s big idea for a big society has been something the Liberal Democrats have been talking about for years” (Royal British Legion speech, 23.4.10). The Liberal Democrats may have been talking about this for years but this movement is not aligned with the Lib Dems. If the Big Society is perceived by the public as benefiting the country, who do you think is going to benefit?

My issue with the Big Society is that while I praise it as an initiative moving the relationship between state and citizen closer to partnership, it is not the same thing as a government collaborating with citizens, a full scale change in the way government operates and citizens are perceived, a reinvention of the state, which this movement demands. Imagine if on the 20 October instead of George Osborne telling the country what was going to happen with the finances the people told George Osborne. This was modelled in the USA this year where 3,500 Americans came together across 57 cities to discuss the nation’s finances. Liberals and conservatives, young and old, rich and poor, people of all races and ethnicities were linked using satellite and webcasts where people were connected across the country to create an authentic, nationwide conversation. The process was facilitated so participants were well informed and a plan for a reduction in the deficit was produced (see AmericaSpeaks).

Where does that leave the Liberal Democrats?

Is it not strange that David Cameron is left almost as a sole voice for the Big Society in Government advocating a change in power relationship between state and citizen, while Lib Dem ministers defend the policy on reducing the deficit? Is it not strange that Philip Blond is left to argue the need to reclaim the liberal legacy from Jo Grimond (the Guardian, 21.9.10) while Nick Clegg argues why the party of Jo Grimond has adopted Conservative Party policy. Surely we are not in the ‘valley of nobody knows’ as this is liberal territory which should offer many answers but we are not capitalising on this opportunity.

This change in governance is inevitable. Look at the Big Society; Obama’s Open Government agenda which has the aim of ‘transparency, participation, and collaboration’; the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts’ (NESTA) work on ‘co-production’ of public services or people-powered public services; or one of the many other social enterprises such as Involve’s work on public engagement in public services. We should be building on NESTA’s work which shows that collaborative services could generate savings of up to six times the investment made in them (Boyle, D. et al. 2010). This is as an opportunity to show the world that we really are about reinventing the state as a reduced size is necessary for effective governance with citizens as partners.

“Collaboration is right at the heart of everything Liberal Democrats believe in” (Alexander, D. 2010) yet there was little in the manifesto about collaboration with citizens. What this movement is crying out for is a more coherent strategy and political leadership. With localism, collaboration and devolving power being the Liberal Democrats’ home territory, it should feel right at home with us. This “is a revolution that is already under way, barely noticed by the mainstream” (Boyle, D. et al. 2010) and it is time we moved our focus onto how we can align this movement with the Liberal Democrats by defining a collaborative governance policy.

The ground work has already been done and the Lib Dems are much further along this debate than others, it just needs to catch up and become a leader for this movement. “The new generation of public administration will need a different spirit… one that fosters mutual effort. This movement from a ‘they’ spirit to a ‘we’ spirit is perhaps the most important mission of public administration in our era” (Vigoda, 2002).

References

Alexander, D. (ed) 2010. Why Vote Liberal Democrat. London: Biteback.

Boyle, D., Slay, J., & Stephens, L. 2010. Public Services Inside Out. Putting Co-Production Into Practice. London: NESTA.

Vigoda, E. 2002. From responsiveness to collaboration: Governance, citizens, and the next generation of public administration. Public Administration Review, 62, 5, 527-540.

Labour have ceded community activism to the Tories, the Lib Dems are now at risk of ceding our ideals

The debate about public services is beginning to cut across party, political, and philosophical lines. There are those who argue that the state should continue to provide public services, those who argue that the private sector can better provide them and those who say that there should be a mix. All of these arguments are alive and well in the Lib Dem Party. However, there is a growing voice for a different way as some believe that we are not utilizing all the skills and abilities this country has to offer through any of these methods.

For anyone who hasn’t been reading this site just search the ‘In Praise Of’ posts as it charts a different path to not only public services but to government. Peter Mandelson has recently come out in favour of this new approach

We will have to find more of our solutions from within the communities that make our society

He goes on to say that he thinks the Big Society is therefore a good idea as it seeks to find solutions from the citizens. For all his ills he was a successful political strategist for the New Labour Party and it has not gone unnoticed that he is supporting the Big Society. Over on the Telegraph Blog they have tried to spot how this new debate is crossing the Labour Party

Mandelson’s endorsement of it is, of course, a veiled criticism of Ed Miliband who has foolishly ceded this territory to the David Cameron. His brother would have made no such mistake. Raising an army of citizen activists was a central plank of David Miliband’s campaign and, had he won the leadership, he would have disputed Cameron’s claim to this Big Idea

And they seem to struggle with the idea than left-right politics really is not a useful tool for understanding post-modern, post-bureaucratic politics.

The willingness of the Labour left to allow the Coalition to identify itself with community activism is quite staggeringly naive. Every time a leftwing comedian or Guardian columnist ridicules the Big Society, I marvel at their complicity in what is, in essence, the theft of one of their core principles.

The Lib Dems are in a better place than either Labour or the Tories to form our own identity in this new debate as this is what ‘reinventing the state’ is all about. It may be unfortunate that we are not getting the credit for some of the positive aspects of reform but this is because people do not associate us with our core ideals: Collaboration and cooperation, devolved power and localism. This is what Liberals joined the party for but not necessarily why people voted for us.

The only debate people hear about of this new way of public service is through the Big Society. This is our failure. Our failure not to have this essential message the central theme of our existence. This is our debate and while Labour may have ceded community activism to the Tories, we cannot cede devolved power and localism, collaboration and cooperation with citizens. If we do, why would someone vote for the Lib Dems now we are no longer a party of protest?

The Big Society is growing into something else (but the Tories other plan will kill it)

Cameron’s Big Society took a good idea and it was then grown into something very strange. It is now supposed to thread through all of the government’s policies. However, what seems to have escaped his attention is that the 2 main themes of this government are incompatible and the other will undermine his Big Idea.

Cameron knows that there is a wealth of experience, knowledge and skills out there which are not being tapped into. He knows that there are many people who want to get involved in making their communities better. He knows that the current government system can get in the way of this. So he wanted a system that tapped into this. One that could listen more. One that gave people more of what they wanted if they were prepared to lead the way.

It is a big idea for a civil society – hence big society. The problem is that this has now grown into a distinction between the Big Society not Big Government i.e. Labour. Well a Big Society may need a Big Government if that is the people’s will and have so many ideas it needs a Big Government to realise those ideas. So this message confuses an essential concept of the Big Society. What he means is Big Society not Big Bureaucracy, which is different.

It has also grown into Cameron preaching to people about what they should be doing with their spare time and that they need to step up. The point of the Big Society is that there are incentives for people to do more in their communities and that the Big Society Government will change to enable them to do more of this. Telling people what to do is the opposite of the whole point of a bottom up approach. This is a continuation of the paternalistic tendencies of the Tories to tell people what is good for them. It also stigmatises those who may not be able to give more to their communities at a particular time for whatever reason. They either have power in their community or they don’t. A change in the relationship between state and citizen requires a change in thinking and if there was a change then it would not need someone telling people what to do.

And then there are the spending cuts. There was an attempt by the Treasury to ask people how to save money, but it is not about saving money, this is about cutting money. The Big Society is a bottom up approach to developing society. It is about letting people have more power and more say. The spending cuts will show people they don’t have power and don’t have a say where the axe falls. Many people will feel powerless and powerless people act powerless. How many powerless people will feel like using this new power to improve their communities? The two are incompatible and the spending cuts undermine the bottom up efforts and will dampen any enthusiasm to take up the offer of having more power. Which will probably result in Cameron preaching to people about what they should be doing.

The Suffolk Virtual Council threatens democracy and undermines the Big Society

The Big Society is here and people are trying to understand what it is and what it means. In the Tory Party they are yet to decide for themselves despite being the inventors and implementers of the policy. At first there was the easycouncil in Barnet which is about as far from the Big Society as you can get as it has no function to create a sense of community action or spirit. Now there is the virtual council in Suffolk proposing to outsource all services with them suggesting that “the concept of the ‘big society’ [is that] communities and individuals [should] do more for themselves, so that they are less reliant on government services”.

The contradictions inside the same party are one thing but there something else which is more worrying. Outsourcing services may be able to foster a community spirit of collaboration but it has a greater chance of not doing so as this is new ground for governments and businesses, but it has serious implications for democracy and accountability.

The local council will set the fee it is willing to pay for a service and go with whoever is able to provide the services for that price, despite how well they are able to really meet the need of the local people. The failures of services are then placed on the service providers and others involved in service delivery and implementation rather than the local council.

Even if there is collaboration between service providers, citizens and other social players, ultimately the local council can wring their hands clean of mistakes and problems as they are only the commissioner and can look for another provider. The problem with this approach is that it denies those involved in policy implementation the flexibility to address specific local circumstances and needs as policy itself continues to be set by the local council (or even central government).

With the council setting the agenda and then asking others to meet it means that there is a clear democratic deficit as those who have the responsibility for implementing the services have little influence over the direction or content of the policies they are implementing. I am not sure this is what was originally meant by the Big Society and it certainly is not what a Liberal Society is as it reduces public accountability.

My vision of the Liberal Society is one where citizens are treated as equals important in the development and implementation process of services which will increase the democratic accountability as you are collaborating directly with government agencies. The state should be reformed to allow for this partnership to flourish, giving power back to where it belongs, with politicians remaining responsible for the effective and appropriate use of power. It is about being less reliant on government services but in the sense that we are working with government services as partners to identify and meet need rather than relying on them to do this.

This outsourcing  project is a potentially major threat to the movement towards collaborative governance as it could undermine genuine efforts to fundamentally change the power relationship between state and citizen.

Cameron’s speech has shown new political battlelines for pro-establishment vs anti-establishment

Following David Cameron’s speech the verdict is… either a failure of David Cameron to explain or a failure of those listening to try and understand. Depending on who you are depends on your position.

I find it very interesting that we have a Tory talking about a fundamental change in relationship between state and citizen yet the Guardian has this to say:

A recent Ipsos Mori poll found that 55% of people had never even heard of the big society; 54% thought it was good in principle but wouldn’t work in practice. The big society is, and always has been, a dead duck… Cameron would be well advised to let the big society go – despite his best attempts to explain it, it just doesn’t chime with the times we are in. 

I’m afraid I could not disagree more. The way we are governed now is dated and is not working. A large bureaucratic system does not allow for people’s views to be taken seriously. It has resulted in lives being ruined or cut short (e.g. medicines due to NICE), lives are made harder by a denial of available support (JobCentre, Social Services, Mental Health Services), or hardship because of money they have to pay because of the way the system is set up, while there are clear cheaper alternative methods available (see Total Place thinking). It is a moral and ethical case that requires us to change the old system.

We will not longer be seen as customers of services but as partners of the government. We will be able to have a voice in the table of power. Changes will take place in real time in response to real life situations. We have the means and it is being tried all over the world right now (see some of my blog posts on Collaboration). It is an inevitability as it is a moral case. The Big Society is David Cameron’s attempt to go with this new movement of change.

The fact that David Cameron is on the right lines but has not hit the right note does not mean the idea is rubbish. He is on to something and some will defend the status quo but anyone interested in fairness and in liberty should start making it their business to understand what he is trying to say. It leaves a massive political gap for someone to come in and communicate this new message for these new times.

How about this: You own the government but you have little say in how it works and what you get back. I would like to change this so you have the power, you have the say, you make the decisions. We will support you, your ideas, and your creativity in making your community work for you. We will give you advisors, budgets, resources and power and you can make this country work as you want it to. Central government will be smaller, local government will be stronger, there will be less bureaucracy and so changes will happen quicker. We want government to be your partner.

I don’t call it the Big Society as this is too vague and some of what comes under the big society sounds too much like preaching to people about what they should or should not be doing with their time. I call the liberal idea of this new political settlement Collaborative Governance. It has nothing to do with cuts. It is a straight forward moral case that a new way of doing things will mean people’s lives will be better as a result.

Big Society vs Liberal Society

Is the ‘Big Society’ how the Liberal Democrats want society? I guess some of this is as I have written about (here and here) and some of it isn’t. I would like to see democracy being expanded, decision making being given to a wider group of people, and a change in the way the government works. The Big Society is David Cameron’s vision of how he wants things which includes some of this. However, he has framed his debate as Big Government Vs Big Society. I believe this is a mistake as it is a negative statement which is a very ineffective way of communicating what you are trying to say. This poster sums it up:This says nothing about devolving power, involving citizens, or changing government which David Cameron says the Big Society is all about. It is for reasons such as this that people do not understand what he is trying to do and it is seen as a cover for cuts and shrinking the state.

So how do the Liberal Democrats communicate the change they want to see. I came across this poster and felt that it summed up the liberal cause very well and says more about forming a new way government works i.e. collaborative services, based on a partnership model where power is devolved to those it closest effects, including giving power back to the people (see my previous posts on Collaboration):

This is more a Liberal Society than the Big Society and one which the Lib Dems have been campaigning for for a long time.

Never thought I’d be praising David Cameron! Isn’t he supposed to be an out of touch Tory PR man?

Image via Wikipedia

I am a Liberal Democrat and I believe that there needs to be big changes to how this country is run. I believe in the Lib Dem commitment to reinvent the state and do something different to what we have always done. I was uneasy about the Coalition and wasn’t sure how it could make these changes; and I am still not. But something strange is happening. David Cameron is starting to make sense?

If we start with where we are, which is with a large public sector without the money to maintain it, centralized power which inhibits local decision making, and a disenfranchised public who don’t feel they have any power in the decisions being made. Then where we want to be is a place where the power is in the hands of those closest to those it will affect, where people are able to join in the decision making process, and a stable financial system where the money is in a position where it can make the biggest difference to the people.

So when David Cameron starts to say that he will

liberate four areas from the strictures of red tape and central government with central government budgets handed over to them to administer at street level, attempt to improve local transport links themselves, take over command of local assets such as pubs and community services, have a greater say over planning permission or local transport and, in the case of Liverpool, allow volunteers to keep a popular local museum open for longer hours.

It starts to sound like the liberal answer to the problems we currently have. But won’t all this cause a big upheaval and be too difficult? Well David Cameron goes on to say

yes, there will be problems – financial problems, legal problems, bureaucratic problems. Yes, there will be objections – local objections, objections from vested interests. But you know what? We’re happy about that. This process is all about learning. It’s about pushing power down and seeing what happens. It’s about unearthing the problems as they come up on the ground and seeing how we can get round them. It’s about holding our hands up, saying ‘We haven’t got all the answers. Let’s work them out, together.

But aren’t we told this is not what Conservatives like

This will be unappealing to conservatives, who prefer people to live tidily, along carefully signposted paths.

So praise where praise is due. David Cameron’s Big Society is turning out to have some good ideas. I prefer to call is collaborative governance but then I am not a PR man but I think people know what collaboration is and it gives a sign to a change in relationship between state and citizen. We can learn a lot from these experiments if they are allowed to flourish and the Lib Dems should benefit from the liberal solutions. We need to champion the idea and find our own language for it for this to happen.

The Big Society is a Liberal Idea the Lib Dems should capitalise on

What is the Big Society exactly? In an age of austerity and a government dominated by deficit reduction, is this just another way to go further on cuts state reduction? Certainly, the Liberal Democrats have not gone along with the idea of the Big Society with Julia Goldsworthy saying is was ‘patronising nonsense’. Some Labour members have seemed almost offended by the idea such as here or here and the Tories have not exactly embraced the Big Society.

So if social democrats and liberals don’t see this as a good idea and the Conservatives are not exactly fully on board, why does polling suggest that people do indeed want this idea despite its poorly communicated ideals?

Over the years people have started to become disillusioned with the current relationship between them and the state. We have seen how the state has got more and more in the way of doing simple things when it should have been an enabler. In education, business,   or more generally how the state has tried to provide for its citizens has been what the citizens have seen as the problem.

The Liberal Democrats see the answer to this as reinventing the state not necessarily reducing it as

The liberal endorses an individual’s autonomy unless there is a greater public interest in interfering with that autonomy. And any such interference – whether by legal instrument, the coercion of state power, the intrusion of the press, or the imposition of a value system – should only go as far as is required and should always be open to question and challenge.

- Jack of Kent

There is a feeling that the state interfered too much, hence the Your Freedom project.  But there has been, and remains, too little in how we can question and challenge what the state is doing. The liberal answer would be to build a system that allows for greater individual and community autonomy which also allows for open questioning and challenge. So it is interesting to hear David Cameron’s own words:

You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Society.

The Big Society is about a huge culture change… It’s about liberation –the biggest, most dramatic redistribution of power from elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street.

I would argue that this fits into the Liberal tradition and is what the Liberal Democrats have advocated for. Cameron’s problem is that he is in the Conservative party. The risk to his idea is that they will reduce the state too much which will mean it will not be able to enable the people to fulfil their ideas or provide the environment for them to grow. While it seems generally agreed that a smaller state is needed, it is not that we need a smaller state per se, it is that we need a change in the spirit of government which changes the relationship between citizen and government; and it just happens that for this to work the state would need to be smaller.

There are a number of arguments to come in this change, one being to keep the old relationship between citizen and state only become more responsive to citizens’ needs or to change it. Then there is the argument of how to create this change of relationship. The problem is that this is not linear and so we are seeing a confusing picture of the need to have a new settlement and of how to create it at the same time.

Adil Abrar has excellently sketched out his thoughts on this suggesting that we are in the valley of nobody knows at the moment where

The solutions aren’t clear. We’re devising them on the fly. We’re in a valley, everything looks pretty shitty, and we’re going to make huge mistakes, but the answers will come

And it is here that the Liberal tradition has much to offer being a great reforming tradition which can fill this valley of nobody knows.  The Liberal Democrats state in their ‘The Power to be Different’ Policy Paper

At the core of liberal democracy is a belief that individuals should have the greatest possible control over their own lives… We want people and communities to wield real political power on their own behalf, and this means putting people in a position where they can make decisions about services that affect them. We believe that it is the duty of the Government to give people this power.

So it is the Liberal Democrats who should pick up the idea and communicate it effectively, champion those with good initiatives, and offer solutions to the unknown. As the Guardian states

It’s happening already, with dedicated local people – trusted and respected in the community – achieving unbelievably positive social outcomes… If David Cameron can implement policies that will enable more people from all backgrounds to be beneficiaries and deliverers of the big society, Cameronism will truly be an innovative radical approach, not just old-fashioned paternalism.

Nick Clegg has already stated that the Big Society fits with the Liberal Democrats’ idea of society but it would be a great shame for the Lib Dems if the Conservatives to take credit for a liberal idea. Or if indeed the Labour Party take up this idea and run with it as has been suggested by the Guardian. Despite the negativity, hostility and ridicule the Big Society has received it has a great opportunity to be a reform people genuinely believe in and one the Lib Dems have been believed in for a long time. The increase in the vote of the Liberal Democrats over the years fits well with the increase in the number of people who want a change in the relationship between government and its agencies with the citizens. People have been urging a change to a more collaborative relationship for a long time and some states have been looking at how to create this change such as in New Zealand or the USA. As it has been put by some academics

The new generation of public administration will need a different spirit… one that fosters mutual effort. This movement from a ‘they’ spirit’ to a ‘we’ spirit is perhaps the most important mission of public administration in our era.

The Big Society is the Conservatives way of responding to this. However, while the Tories run with the idea there is a risk that the whole idea will be seen as a mask for a way to create an ideologically smaller state, which misses the big idea of the Big Society. If this idea, in whatever form, is not taken up by those who can genuinely reform the relationship between state and citizen then it will be dropped and we miss a great Liberal opportunity.