Presumption – progressive policy visions are useless absent an underlying philosophical framework – the aff is presumptively false until it can justify the way it constructs and understands the value of redistribution

Nick Pearce, “What should social democrats believe?” Institute for Public Policy Research, 19 September 2013, https://www.ippr.org/juncture/what-should-social-democrats-believe#note1.

It is a curious feature of current intellectual debate on the political centre-left in Britain that so little of it reflects on the fundamental goals of modern social democracy. In part, this is because these goals are taken for granted: the Labour movement stands for equality, often expressed as social justice and a fairer society. This egalitarian commitment seems so foundational and instinctive that discussion tends to take on a largely empirical and procedural hue, such as whether Labour was too tolerant in government of increased inequality at the top of society.

Consequentially, the content or meaning of equality is simply assumed, despite the manifold diversity of its expressions as an idea. As important, there is little discussion of how the normative ambition for greater equality should relate to other values that have resonance on the centre-left. For example, how might a commitment to equality need to be bolstered, or tempered, by demands for personal liberty, democratic self-government, the priority of human relationships, or the desire to protect and conserve things of value to people?

There is an array of ideological orientations that could emerge from the interactions among these different ideas. It might be argued that such ambitions are enemies of equality, or at least subordinate to it, and so should be rejected or downgraded. Alternatively, they might not be viewed as competitors to equality at all, but as goals that are incorporated within it, at least when properly understood and expressed. A converse contention might be that some or all or the political instincts laid out above constitute a profound challenge to the idea of equality, requiring it to be substantively modified, or even replaced as the guiding ambition for the centre-left.

Such debates are not only relevant to the question of the type of society to which the contemporary left aspires. They also have purchase on the character of politics it advances and the kinds of methods it deploys in the service of its goals. Significantly, such wider questions of statecraft and political strategy have also been largely unexplored in recent years. And while the Labour party's policy review is gathering pace, a firmer ideological stance would help to provide a framework for its policy orientation and a perspective on how its normative goals should be thought about in its plans for different areas of our national life. Indeed, without such clarity, there is a real danger that social democrats remain fundamentally directionless.

Whereas earlier periods of revisionism, particularly in the 1950s and the 1980s, saw extensive debates within the Labour party and across the wider left about core philosophical convictions and the means of achieving them, contemporary discussion has largely been confined to thinkers associated with 'Blue Labour' and its twin critiques of left liberalism and Fabianism.1 Social democratic self-reflection has been far more limited.2 Unlike previous eras, when Labour leaderships have ridden wider intellectual currents, it is striking that much of what new thinking there has been has come from Ed Miliband himself, through themes such as 'predistribution' and 'responsible capitalism'.