I went along last night to see the launch of Open Left, the new project James Purnell will be leading at DEMOS. Some brief observations. I was struck by how consistent Purnell's occasional forays into political philosophy have been. He has a reputation as a schemer; the "smooth assassin" as the Guardian put it when he resigned after June's election. But he is also one of a handful of Labour ministers who make a habit of dabbling in political philosophy. (this small group includes Liam Byrne, who last week hosted Etzioni at the Treasury, both Milibands, and David Lammy. Its also not a group without ambitions; the perception of some philosophical depth helps politicians looks credible.)
Three years ago I sat in a mostly empty room in the House of Commons listening to Purnell give a lecture on the "aspiration society." That lecture was pretty much the same message as last night.
A few years back he said:
Will equality of opportunity do? It's a radical concept, and fits with many of our instincts. But it is too loose to guide policy or to generate public support. This is for two reasons – first, everyone can say they believe in equality of opportunity. The driest member of the No Turning Back Group can fly this standard, and just say that those who are poor failed to take the opportunities that were given to them. But second, and perhaps more fundamentally, equality of opportunity is hard to operationalise. How does an individual know if they have equality of opportunity? What does that even mean? Equality of opportunity is hard to measure in a society; it's almost impossible to judge whether it's been realised for a particular individual. That's where Amartya Sen's ideas about capability, and indeed those of Joseph Raz on autonomy, come in. They provide us with a richer concept of equality, and one that is a better call to action.Last night it was much the same, as was the Guardian article published yesterday. But what then does this capabilities approach mean in practice? Philosophically, Sen's capability theory was meant to perform a quick u-turn to get philosophical liberalism out of a dead-end dilemna in which egalitarian and liberal theories of justice were seen to be in tension. But now, in the hands of Purnell (and also DEMOS ) it is being turned into a means of providing the British left with a policy u-turn out of the dead-end of Brownism. Will it work? John Cruddas last night said it didn't mean much without equality of outcome. Stuart White agrees at the Fabian's blog, saying the danger is that capabilities will be used to duck a debate about redistributing income. And certainly if you read Purnell's remarks the policy which flows from them has an unmistably Blairite tinge to it.
But as I read it, the danger isn't that that a real focus on capabilities ends up providing a small target for a more liberal, anti-statist left. Instead it risks creating a situation in which even the best egalitarian programmes undertaken by this Labour government, or another in the future, fail by definition. Take child poverty. Purnell says a capabilities approach would require ending child poverty, and so it should. But the point about Sen's theory was that a focus on income wasn't sufficient to ensure equal chances of living a good life — meaning that even a target as demanding as say 5% of children at some point under 60% of median income (which is the working definition in Sweden for zero child poverty) wouldn't be nearly enough to ensure anything close to equal capability. Equal capability is a much more demanding outcome than the "welfarist" settlement it criticises, and is meant to replace.
It might be that Purnell's aim is to question the role of the state alone to deliver such a target, and that is all well and good. Certainly that would fits nicely with the anti-statist tinge in DEMOS's "liberal republic", which also sang the praises of the capabilities approach. But it might be that it instead introduces a much more demanding egalitarian hurdle than the simple redistrubtion of income alone. And that, I suspect, would not have been what either Purnell or DEMOS intented.
