The shape of British politics became a little clearer last week. The next few years will be an argument between aspiration and conservation. The party that wins that argument will win the next election.

David Cameron may have worked for Margaret Thatcher. But in many ways he is a throwback to an earlier Tory tradition. Like Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home, he is trying to persuade his party that the Labour Government has produced a durable settlement on the economy and on public services. He wouldn’t have initiated the changes of the past decade, but he has realised he can’t turn the clock back.

His problem will be persuading the Conservative Party of this. But he has another, even more intractable problem. It isn’t just that he is a Conservative — it is that he is conservative. He knows that he can’t argue against the world as it is. But he has no vision of how he wants it to be. That’s why he is tempted to press pause in the NHS. It explains his cloudy rhetoric about social responsibility.

Such conservation would damage Britain, just as it did in the 1950s. The decline of the 1960s and 1970s can be traced to the deferred decisions of that decade. Our history might have been very different if we had confronted the Empire illusion, shaped the European Union from the start and reformed our economy in the way Germany and Japan were rebuilding theirs.

Expert View

The policy review has merely scratched the surface of the underlying spending and tax choices facing the Government

Peter Riddell

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BACKGROUND

• At long last, the happy couple have exchanged their vows in public

• Blair's 'personal' future for public services

• Main points: vision for 'personal public services'

If Britain is to continue to prosper, we need to resist the siren song of conservatism once again. That is why the Government’s Policy Review is important. It is an attempt to do what governments do very rarely — to think out loud in office, to be clear about our goals and debate new ways to achieve them.

The central principle of this next phase of government should be the extension of power to the people. It is a principle that the Conservatives are especially ill-equipped to embody. It is an egalitarian principle, where they remain essentially elitist. And it calls for an enabling State rather than a shrinking one. The Cameron thesis is that if the State withdraws, then miraculously the people are granted power. But the opposite is true — if the State withdraws, then those with power keep it, and those without fall further behind.

But the old social democratic approach, which saw the State providing broadly the same service to everyone, will not be enough, either. People today have different aspirations from each other, and face different barriers, so public services must meet their different needs. Public services need to be personal.

So, we should resist the conservatism of both Left and Right. Instead, as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have made clear, we should aim for an enabling State, which gives power to individuals and communities, and trusts them to know how to use it. This means government doing everything it can to help people to get on, and overcome the barriers they face Life chances should not be inherited at birth. That means an unrelenting focus on education. The Budget’s goal of narrowing the funding gap between state and private schools gives us the platform. We now need a debate about how that funding can be matched with reform so that more equal funding leads to more equal life chances.

Over time, the extra funding will allow us to give better individual attention to all pupils. It might mean smaller classes in deprived areas, or having a core curriculum with more freedom to teach. Academies are succeeding in turning around failing schools — we could consider other ways in which we can contract out failing services to voluntary and private providers, for example around helping excluded pupils.

But we should also be aiming to stretch those with particular talents. We could pilot Talent Budgets, where secondary-school pupils are given funds to develop their skill — whether for an individual to take extra music or sport lessons, or for groups of young people to pool their budgets to set up a business or get extra tuition to go to university.

Our aim would be an aspiration society. We could consider the model of the Climate Change Bill — of setting a bold goal, independently monitored, which then requires government action. We could also learn from the success of the Pensions Commission and set up a body to analyse the problem and suggest policy. Ministers and civil servants would have clear criteria to evaluate policies against how they would affect life chances.

The goal could be, as in Denmark, to ensure that children have the same chances, whatever their parents’ wealth. That goal would not be achieved overnight. But if other countries can do it, then there is no reason we can’t aim to do the same.

This would be the beginning of the next era of change in British politics. The conservative announces by his name that he wants to conserve. Despite a few modern gimmicks, it is becoming clear that Cameron is, deep down, an old-style “steady as she goes” Tory. In an era defined by the rapidity of change, that is far too modest an ambition for Britain.

Social responsibility is an important means — everyone agrees the voluntary sector is important. But it is not enough. We need a clear goal — an aspiration society — and an effective method — an enabling State. That is a more radical and ambitious vision for Britain than Cameron's conservatism. Jim Murphy is the Welfare Minister. James Purnell is the Pensions Minister.

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