The Ideology Phoenix

This month the POWER Commission released their inquiry into the state of democracy in the UK. It's a very interesting document and very readable. Their conclusion is that far from being politically apathetic the people of Britain are just as interested and involved as ever, the problem is that the two party system is failing them because it's based on an outdated class/ideology system.

What they propose in its stead is an atomization of the political process, whereby the power of the Executive is decreased and the balance of power is re-established at a much more local level.
I don't disagree with the method of re-balancing power, but I do feel that it does nothing to compensate for effect this will have on individualisation. For example how will this dovetail with the growth of citizenship and national identity the government plan to bring in?

I'm very much of the view that ideology needs to be re-born not abandoned. And I'm not alone. In Terror & Liberalism (a book I thoroughly recommend) Paul Berman makes the same point as does this discussion of Geoff Mulgan's new organisation Involve. The problem with ideology is not that it doesn't exist, rather that it has lost its coherency and its mass appeal, there is no set of guidelines or objectives under which people of all interests can collect. This was always the strength of a secular ideology and the weakness of the cultural relativism that emerged in the 70s and 80s.

In my opinion the POWER inquiry is glossing over the real issue here. Certainly reduce the power the government has to bypass contested legislation and increase the role that the public play in this context, but this needs to be combined with a set of positive values taught to everybody regardless of their particular interest or social background.