Politics seems less a marketplace of ideas, more a shady auction – we must change that

Society is a set of promises we make and keep to each other. That the strong will take care of the frail; that by paying in what we can, when we can, we will be taken care of when we lose our way. That we understand the value of educating our young to enable them to build the world of our future.

But, if you believe – as Thatcherites (i.e. UKIP and most Tories) do that there is no such thing as Society then you do not believe that we have made and should honour those promises that go beyond our immediate circle. If you believe – as David Cameron does – that there is such a thing as Society, but that the state has no role to play in it, then you remove government from any role in monitoring how we keep our promises or obligation to deliver them.

The promises we make to each other as a society are rarely codified or written down. I don’t walk down the street stopping every person I meet of pensionable age explaining to them how happy I am to pay my tax towards their pension as they once did towards those ahead of them and as the next generation will hopefully do for me.

We often hear the phrase at the moment “politics is broken”. This is sometimes put down to individual actions on the part of governments (For Labour the Iraq war is the obvious choice) or individual broken promises (tuition fees for example) but I think it goes deeper than that. For 30 years or so, these silent unspoken promises that used to be so deeply ingrained in our national story have been questioned, eroded and denigrated.

I was asked yesterday why young people aren’t more angry at the shocking way in which their rights – their very futures – are being cynically stolen from them. Why they aren’t on the streets en mass, every day.

For me I use the analogy of the frog in boiling water. It is said that if you drop a frog in a pan of boiling water, it will jump straight back out. However, if you put a frog into a pan of cold water and turn up the heat gradually, it will not perceive the danger it is in and will be eventually cooked to death.

Since Thatcher broke the post war consensus on those promises we owe each other, these have been in contention. There has – for most of my life time been an eroding not just of individual rights, freedoms and services, but of those willing to make the argument for our deeper promises to each other.

Politicians now squabble over who will be the toughest implement the fewest rights. They rarely make the philosophical arguments over those rights in the first place. Politics now seems less a marketplace of ideas, but a shady auction of who can best implement the one overarching idea. That we will get less and that the next generation will get less still. And that this is a good thing for us as individuals and that we as individuals, not us as a society is what matters.

That is not good enough for me. We must be making the arguments not for small policies that tinker around the edges of Thatcherism, but for changing the system as a whole. And to be fair to Ed Miliband, that is precisely what he initially tried to do with his leadership, and precisely why Thatcher’s winners loathe him so.

But as we have approached the pre-election period, we seem less engaged with making these bigger arguments about how society is organised and more about offering our own deal for individuals, a return to transactional politics.

A tax rise here, and an investment in a service there won’t be enough to make this a better country. It won’t inspire hope because it doesn’t play into the frame of changing things at a fundamental level.

We need to make promises we can keep and arguments we can win. Some of what I would like to achieve will be far from doable – particularly in the short term. But as Ed and his team have started to take a longer term view – making promises not just for one parliament but for a decade – I would like to see this long termism shift from individual policies that don’t make for an understanding of who we are fundamentally to a new way of talking about and shaping our society.

We can make bigger and better promises to each other. The ones we already make have proved to be remarkably resilient in the face of the beating they have taken over more than quarter of a century. Now it is time to promise again.