What should we make of the resignation of Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, following his coalition’s defeat in a vote of confidence in the upper house of parliament, the Senate? British commentators might reassure themselves ‘but that was Italy’, assuming that anything as colourful as punches flying around the woolsack couldn’t happen here. Not in the Lords’ present moribund condition, perhaps, but could it in future?
Italian journalists, by the way, haven’t written up yesterday’s events as if it were yet another humdrum day in the dysfunctional life of their nation’s politics. They sense something ‘un-Italian’ about it all, …
So, here it is. The volume which will be written up as the liberal riposte to The Orange Book.
It’s going to tell us how we can regain the fervour and the achievement of our New Liberal forefathers – how, in the new millennium, we can protect the inheritance of the welfare state which our party and our thinkers created, and how we can best continue to strive for the fairer society all liberals want. Trouble is, Reinventing the State can’t live up to that billing.
It’s a heavy-weight contender, nearing 400 pages, and with 22 chapters from 21 contributors. It has some excellent chapters: pick it up, turn to the back and read the impressive, clear-headed conclusions by Steve Webb and Jo Holland. If you like your prose persuasively measured, be warmed by Chris Huhne’s liberal narrative, ‘The Case for Localism’. Or, if you prefer a text which is angry and splendidly strident, be converted by Paul Holmes on ‘The Limits of the Market.’ But, as a whole, Reinventing the State is both too sprawling and, paradoxically, too limited to hit the mark.
This is a problem of all books which are somewhere between political thought and political policy: they have to be a snapshot, a work of the moment with in-built obsolescence. They necessarily lack a longer perspective. This does not mean that they do not mention history – the liberal tradition, as defined in its fully-developed form of New Liberalism, effuses this book and, in particular, David Howarth’s knowledgeable chapter.
But what they find harder to do it is to appreciate their own place in that historical context. This matters because, in the case of Reinventing the State, it means what is being said is being undersold.
