Citizen and the state
A couple of years ago I attended a Downing Street brainstorm on "the role of the citizen and the state" chaired by the then Prime Minister Tony Blair.
"There needs to be a fundamental re-examination of the future relationship between citizen and state", Mr Blair argued, admitting that during his period in office he had too often felt it necessary to control from the centre.
He talked of the need for a smaller and strategic state built upon a new contract which spelt out not only the responsibilities of government but the responsibilities of citizens.
One of the reasons for his philosophical shift lay among the Cabinet Office papers on the table in No 10 that day. "The UK remains among the most unequal societies in the EU", the authors admitted. "The very poorest have not shared in recent growth."
It was a candid assessment of his own failure which got rather ignored amidst the then fevered speculation about his handover to Gordon Brown.
But David Cameron was watching closely and taking notes.
The No 10 analysis fitted with the Tory leader's own concerns about central government's inability to reach and help the very poorest in society.
Labour had made some inroads. Six hundred thousand children lifted out of poverty, no mean achievement.
Overall, the least well off 20% in Britain had narrowed the gap on those above them. But the poorest 5-10% in the UK was actually falling further behind.
Not that Whitehall hadn't tried. Initiatives like Sure Start, working family tax credits and the minimum wage were designed to help just this group. But whatever levers were pulled seemed to have little or no effect.
Money was targeted to help schools in deprived areas and yet, on some measures, the gap between pupils from the poorest backgrounds and others widened.
It was, in part, Tony Blair's sense of powerlessness in reaching what advisors called "the severely disadvantaged" that led him to question the role of the state.
And just as Labour's policy review teams were busy cogitating and brainstorming, so former Tory leader for David Cameron, considering how a Conservative administration might deal with the plight of what he called the "underclass".
we get a little more meat on the bones of the Tory thinking. Shadow schools minister Michael Gove ridicules the current government philosophy: "I fear, for Gordon Brown there is no such thing as society", he says, "only the individual and the state."
A neat back-reference to Margaret Thatcher's much-misquoted line on society and the promise of a more complex contract between citizen and government.
On the role of the citizen, Mr Gove says this: "of those to whom much is given, much is expected". Although he doesn't credit him, this is almost an exact lift from John F Kennedy: "of those to whom much is given, much is required". Or to quote another line of JFK's: "ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country".
And on the role of the state: the responsibility of narrowing the gap between the richest and poorest - one of the fractures in what the Conservatives characterise as a broken society.
How would that be achieved? "Our social policy", Mr Gove makes clear, "is explicitly redistributive". In his own area of schools policy, money will flow from rich to poor in the form of pupil premiums - additional funding for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
More broadly, the Conservatives stress the importance of devolving power away from Whitehall to local government and civic society; of the need for the state to become more active in supporting and encouraging traditional family structures.
What politicians from all parties will concede is that the poorest in Britain seem to losing ground on the rest, and attempts to pull them closer by throwing policy lifelines from the centre hasn't worked. Whether a redrawing of the roles of citizen and state will provide better answers is far from clear.
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