For many years Conservatism was on the back foot, not only electorally but also intellectually. All the running in the field of ideas seemed to be made by new Labour as it sought ways of modernising the exhausted creed of socialism.

But now we are, for the first time in my political life, leading the debate in ideas. Last week Matthew Taylor, the new director of the Royal Society of Arts, published an essay called Pro-Social Behaviour. Taylor until recently was head of the policy unit at 10 Downing Street. It is that which makes his essay so remarkable. For the thrust of his essay is that the model of politics that Labour has promoted is wrong for the 21st century.

Taylor argues that instead of “new laws, new taxes and new regulations”, we need “citizen-centric” politics, designed to empower individuals and communities to take control of the decisions that affect their lives. To do him credit, he acknowledges that this is exactly the argument David Cameron has been making for the past year. We call it “social responsibility”.

When David and I began his campaign for the party leadership in 2005, we placed at the centre of our thinking the notion that “there is such a thing as society — it is just not the same thing as the state”. Taylor now declares, with all the force of revelation, that he himself is “an enthusiast for collective action but sceptical about state action”. He is right. But Labour has always preferred a national policy to a local response. Its solutions are inflexible and remote from the people they are designed to serve.

For those on the left, “society” really is code for “the state”: all collective action is state action. In this group are Gordon Brown and his followers, preparing for power at last.

At the launch of Taylor’s essay at the RSA on Wednesday, Ed Miliband, the minister for the third sector and a leading Brown ally, welcomed the emphasis on voluntary action. But he made a crucial argument which distinguishes the Brownites from the Conservatives. Citizen engagement would lead to more, not less, state action, as people come together to discover new priorities and lobby for an increase in government services. A minister for voluntary services, ironically, was making a case for more government intervention.

Despite the occasional efforts of the prime minister to modernise the system, Brown has ensured that our public services remain large, cumbersome monopolies. Their users, parents and patients, are not active and empowered but mere supplicants for the chancellor’s largesse.

Indeed he is quite explicit. “In healthcare,” he has argued, “we know that the consumer is not sovereign.” And further, Brown has delivered a whole lecture series on the need not only for public funding of public services, but also public provision.

Although Alan Milburn, the Blairite former health secretary, apparently understands the need for personalised, user-driven public services, he knows enough about Brown to know that this vision will not be delivered.

It is the wrong trend. Taylor points to research which suggests that parental engagement, or its absence, is more important in shaping a child’s educational achievement than the child’s school. This is natural — and yet parental engagement is deliberately frustrated by a system that forces parents in search of a good school place into the equivalent of a bread queue in the old Soviet bloc.

The Conservative party is preparing policies which will deliver real reform to our public services. Rather than the hectic and often contradictory reorganisations of the Blair years, we will create a process of gradual and organic reform in which the structures are progressively modified to enable frontline professionals, and the users of their services, to shape the system themselves.

Taylor — echoing the Olsen lecture that I delivered in the autumn — talks of “Web 2.0”, the current revolution on the internet. Whereas Web 1.0 was about services and information being provided from a single source to merely passive and receptive users, Web 2.0 is about users being directly involved in the construction of the content. The classic distinction is between the Encyclopaedia Britannica going online (Web 1.0) and wikipedia.org, the encyclopaedia which is generated by readers and academics in a collaborative process (Web 2.0). We need Public Services 2.0.

The Blair years will be seen as a giant wasted opportunity when it comes to public service reform. The golden combination of a big parliamentary majority, public goodwill and a strong inherited economy was squandered as the new government dismantled grant-maintained schools and GP fundholding.

Only now, in the twilight of his premiership, have Blair’s closest allies attempted to reintroduce elements of diversity and choice. Even then, as with trust schools, they can win parliamentary votes only with Conservative support. For the tragedy is that just as the Blairites “get it”, they are handing over to the Brownites who don’t. Blairites know better than anyone that the reform programme will stall under Brown, who has tried to block their every step. That is why Lord Adonis is working round the clock to establish academy schools before the chancellor moves into No 10.

Read the public speeches and listen to the private remarks of the Blairites and it is clear that they understand that future reform and the whole social responsibility agenda will depend on Cameron and the modern Conservatives. Deep down they know that the torch must pass to a new generation.

The author is shadow chancellor

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