‘if we were a more collectivist society, the state would not have to intervene so much to alter behaviour and make us clean up after ourselves environmentally and culturally.’

There’s a paradox here that Cameron is going to run into very quickly. As I understand it, his vision depends upon nurturing the kind of individual and collectivist behaviour that will reduce the need for a large interventionist state.

To do that he will have to introduce Nudge-inspired policies that will feel very alien to traditional conservative values. It’s difficult to reconcile central government initiatives on behaviour change with the self-reliance of traditional Tory voters.

And he’ll need at least one term’s worth of high profile central government action to ween us off our dependency on big government- all this against a backdrop of major cuts.

Just as you pointed out in your post about Barnet Matthew, the transitions that the Conservatives plan, while exciting in some areas, are going to require huge investment and a lot of hands on state action to begin with.

On the education debate- well, I’m with you, I just despair. We get Troops to Teachers after how much research? Yet the Cambridge report gets brushed aside.

I suspect that this isn’t so different from being “an enthusiastic collectivist but a sceptical statist”. After all, states are prime actors in the construction, defence or destruction of collectives, but over much longer time horizons than either politicians or policy-makers can work with. For instance, the impact – positive and negative – of the welfare state upon collectivism occurs over an entirely separate temorality than the imperatives (fiscal, media, economic cycle, elections) that shape how it is governed.

Equally, the quality and quantity of a society’s collectivism has an impact upon states’ capacity and requirement to act. High levels of collectivism increase the capacity to act: in the US the GI Bill (or maybe even the Civil Rights Act) was only possible because of the social capital built up over the war. But they also reduce the necessity to act: if we were a more collectivist society, the state would not have to intervene so much to alter behaviour and make us clean up after ourselves environmentally and culturally.

Perhaps one of the main reasons to be sceptical of the British state is that our society is not sufficiently collectivist for it to function as well as it might… (I think this was why Rousseau held out hope for very small states, with Denmark perhaps a case in point).