In just over a month’s time we will have a new government. But what kind of government will it be? We already know that Starmer is in love with councils, arms-length commissions, and quasi-public bodies of all kinds. Labour is committed to a British Infrastructure Council, a National Wealth Fund and Great British Energy (all under the sponsorship or direction of a Treasury Enterprise Growth Unit). There has also been a commitment to centralise policy delivery in Downing Street.

The reflex to embrace concentrated bureaucratic power has deep ideological roots in the party, going all the way back to the Fabian Society in the 1890s. For someone like the redoubtable Beatrice Webb, Socialism could only become a serious political proposition if the intellectuals and managers within the young Labour movement learnt to use the State-machine more efficiently and imaginatively than Britain’s traditional stilted governing class. In this regard, the Fabians agreed with George Orwell’s later assessment that ‘(England) is a family with the wrong members in control’.

But in time Labour administrators became just as stodgy as the elites they sought to replace. Rachel Reaves, and Keir Starmer are inheritors of a long Labour tradition of peculiar complacency in the sphere of political economy. They display the naive assumption that Labour at the helm is enough to steady the ship. They dare not check to see if the ship is leaking.

It is easy of course to mock the Labour leadership’s current pretensions, but it’s not as if the contemporary Centre-Right has a compelling alternative. Confronted with bureaucratic blight, Conservative politicians (and on occasion some Orange Book Liberals) have alighted on two dubious remedies.

The first is to leave the structure and functions of the state intact but starve agencies of funds in a bid to drive up efficiency. Bureaucracy may wither in the short-term but faced with the social fallout of a dysfunctional governmental machine, pressures inevitably begin to mount for renewed expansion. The machine slowly drifts back into its old position, sometimes more centralised than before.

The second response of the Centre-Right is to leave state liabilities unchanged while contracting out core public functions to the private sector. Nearly thirty years on, we have seen the results. A ballooning public apparatus concerned with tendering, compliance, and targets has replaced inhouse services. The government spends ever more on consultants. Accompanying this explosion of external providers, we have seen a proliferation of arms-length semi-public bodies (Academy chains, Universities, the water utilities) that are neither fully accountable to citizens, nor to Parliament. We appear caught between life-sapping statism on the one hand and unresponsive corporate power on the other.

What alternative might their be to this rather grim future? Whatever the precise character of the next government, I continue to believe that we in the Liberal Democrats have the political vision to chart a different course. Liberals believe that self-creation and initiative are just as freeing as secure homes, municipal parks, or public healthcare. We believe that the human spirit finds deep and enduring liberation in the capacity to craft a life of which the individual can be proud. We are not however Libertarians. We accept the necessity of governmental organisation, but we also insist that tools for local self-organisation and mutual aid are more powerful and life-giving than any quango. It is for this reason that Liberals have historically insisted on what Jo Grimond called ‘Socialism without the state’. In place of great centralising monoliths we have championed worker-owned co-operatives, mutuals and community land-trusts.

If electors are generous, we may have packed benches after the next Election. We will have new Liberal Democrat voices, ready and willing to take our case to the Executive. And our case must be this: Democracy must be given substance, not through a proliferation of office holders, but through the capacity of people to make their lives better.

Labour wants to bring rail firmly back into the public sector. But will those who work on the network be given a voice in how the industry is run? Labour wants to improve public childcare, but will parents have a chance to create services that work best for them? Labour’s ambition is to strengthen people’s rights at work. But will individual employees have more power in their workplaces? Will they have a vote on boards or a share in the business?

Keir Starmer is fond of the word ‘service’. But his idea of service appears to depend too much on government doing things ‘to’ or ‘for’ people. At the present time there is not enough space, either in economic life or political architecture for the kind of social and economic renewal we need, one which makes service reciprocal and shared.

* Ben Wood is a Project Editor at the John Stuart Mill Institute. He is a member of Leeds Liberal Democrats.