One the more interesting things about George Osborne’s emergency budget this week was his use of the word “progressive”.
The word appeared only twice in his speech: “We are a progressive alliance governing in the national interest” and “Overall, everyone will pay something, but the people at the bottom of the income scale will pay proportionally less than the people at the top. It is a progressive Budget.” When it did, however, it was clearly intended to be quotable and iconic.
Doctrinaire progressives, like Polly Toynbee, were scornful. A few “Lib Dem yellow ribbons [may have] decorated the axe handle, but they barely impeded the executioner’s swing,” she commented. “If these were the promised ‘progressive cuts’, then the word vanished into the realm of doublethink.”
There are two questions of interest here. First, was the budget ‘progressive’, in the narrow sense of the word; i.e. did it weight the burden of taxation towards those with greater income and assets? According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, that is “a debatable claim”.
There were some headline progressive measures, such as re-linking the basic state pension to earnings and increasing the personal income tax threshold by £1,000 to £7,475. But there were others that were clearly not, such as the level set for capital gains tax for higher earners (at 28% it is much lower than higher rate income tax), and, most notably, the increase in VAT to 20%.
According to the IFS, the “budget looks less progressive – indeed somewhat regressive – when you take out the effect of measures that were inherited from the previous government, when you look further into the future than 2012-13, and when you include some other measures that the Treasury has chosen not to model.”
The second question is related but broader. Why did Osborne feel the need to stick the progressive flag so prominently in his budget? Was it simply to smooth ruffled Lib Dem feathers? Or is it now the case that all politics must be progressive, or at least claim progressive colours, to be morally legitimate?
It seems hard to believe it was only the first. Leading Liberal Democrats may like to hear Cameron and Osborne talk about the ‘progressive coalition’ but if that coalition is not, in fact, progressive (or at least, nothing like progressive enough for Lib Dem supporters), Clegg, Cable, et al will swiftly lose credibility both within and beyond their party.
It may, therefore, be that ‘progressive’ is the new black (to use that most hackneyed of phrases) and that all politics is or must now appear ‘progressive’.
If that is so, Toynbee is partly right. ‘Progressive’ will not have become an example of doublethink so much as non-think. As soon as more or less everyone within the political spectrum (there will always be outliers) lays claim to a word, that word becomes emptied of its substantive content. ‘Progressive’ will become like ‘liberal’.
That, though, may not be a bad thing. Just because most parliamentarians are happy to be called a liberal, that does not mean differences and debates about liberalism have ended. They have merely shifted to discussions over what kind of liberals people are and what kind of liberal society they advocate.
So it may be with ‘progressive’. If Toynbee and Osborne, Clegg and Cameron can all embrace the progressive label, it will only mean that they (and we) shall have to wrestle with exactly what kind of progressive they are or, put another way, what kind of future they want us to progress towards.
If that helps us to move away from name-calling and to drag a little more content and specificity into political discourse, it will have been worth it.
Nick Spencer is Director of Studies at Theos.
