While the government will want to clear up its messy year of Finance Bills with an orderly status quo Budget, it needs to be bolder and start investing

Next month is Chancellor Philip Hammond's first Autumn Budget. Yet the pomp for the event might be diminished by the fact that the previous finance bill will only just reach it's third reading this Tuesday.

The Chancellor's Spring Budget had been one for pluggling holes. There were Reliefs for those affected by business rate changes. A tax rise for the self-employed (on which he later u-turned). And there was spending - in the millions rather than billions - across key areas like health and social care, construction and education.

All of these came as the clearance of the debt and deficit, and restoration of growth - the long term promises of the Conservatives - remained a long way from being a achieved.

With the truncated Parliamentary session, the Finance Bill reappeared in the Summer once the new MPs took their seats. It has a been a messy and confusing year that will have left many in confusion as to what is and isn't in the Treasury's plans.

The first obstacle the government must navigate is the amendments to the Finance Bill. Labour and Cooperative backbencher Stella Creasy put forward a series of amendments that press the government to action on tax evasion and the exploitative gains made by those corporations who engaged in PFI, private-public investment schemes under Blair and Brown.

These are yet more subjects on which the Tories are divided. And Labour pressure, with Conservative backbench support has ensured that changes will need to be made to the Universal Credit rollout come the Autumn Budget. 

That will have to mean another government U-turn - a term that is coming to be the lasting testament to how ineffective Conservative government has been. They promised stability and only produce confusion.

To that end, the instincts of Hammond and the government will surely be for this messy year of Finance Bills to be tied off with a clean, efficient budget that gets everyone on the same page. To resist change. Status quo may well be the order of the day.

And yet, action is needed. Globalisation continues to reek havoc on communities, as outside of the rich bubbles were technology and advantage and money clusters, investment is dire.

As Mariana Mazzucato stresses, the big private players do not take risks and will not redress this balance themselves. The state needs to invest and create markets, to be the pioneer that the private sector simply isn't.

The 2017 budget has to tackle the lack of opportunities, the need for innovative new industry with the training to staff them, and the cost of living that suppresses and excludes so many. Government can only achieve these things if the public sector steps out in front and takes the lead.

The reality of austerity Britain: work and life are now poor, precarious and uncertain

People gather in Manchester to march against austerity past the Conservative Party Conference 2017.

The reality of the Tories' austerity Britain was exposed in the figures released last week. Those figures revealed that wage growth remains poor at 2.2%, barely above pre-crash levels and falling behind consumer prices rises, with inflation now at 2.9%.

But what do these figures tell us about the big picture of austerity Britain?

Consider Theresa May's response when confronted on issues like poor wages - unemployment is falling. Whenever the PM is confronted, she turns to the unemployment/employment figures. The trouble is, you can't just say that employment is in itself a fix.

Especially when it evidentially isn't the case. Britain might have it's highest recorded employment and lowest unemployment, but what do we know about the quality of life that is providing? What we know, is that working poverty is now very high.

There is no essential truth that employment fixes people's problems or empowers them. Work can only bring liberty under certain conditions.

And austerity Britain is a land of precarity, where social security has been replaced with - or perhaps, outsourced to - uncertain and scarce low paid work. All of which is now threatened by automation, and pits ordinary people against each other in long applicant lists.

This is only heightened by the flaming wreckage of the welfare system. People in need are left without support, and in mounting arrears, for a month and a half when claim out of work support - a situation the government are struggling to even convince there own party to support.

Inevitably, Brexit comes into this. It is important that the ideological case behind leaving the European Union was never made clear. But it's argument for 'freer trade' and less regulation, is a pitch to go further down the road on which we currently travel - to a place of permanently less surety or stability.

But why would those who have campaigned so hard for Brexit want this?

Pete North, Editor of LeaveHQ, blogged how - what he himself described as - the long, painful years of austerity still to come, will in fact be a price worth paying (by ordinary people whose lives would be left in tatters) to accomplish a kind of vague social change, that displayed for more ignorance about young people than any comprehensive thought on the subject.

The governments of David Cameron and Theresa May have pledged a more compassionate conservatism, that takes care of those most in need, while being responsible with the public finances. They have been failures on both fronts.

None of their measures have delivered on even one of these aims. The debt continues to climb. Meeting deficit targets is still delayed. All the pain of austerity and ordinary lives dropped in uncertainty, and the government has nothing to show for it - neither in the public finances or in producing a compassionate society.

Seven years of Conservative government has been a diastrous experiment. It's time to get off this road and find a new way forward.

Labour and the Basic Income: To make automation work for people, first the relationships between people and society, work and welfare, must be reframed

To tackle the problems of the future, first we need to rethink our approach to work and welfare. Photograph: Job Centre Plus by Andrew Writer (License) (Cropped)

In the passed few weeks, the Labour Party has been talking up it's determination to make technological advances work for ordinary people, rather than disenfranchise them.

For the party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the focus has been on the workplace. Corbyn has raised the question of how to use cooperative collective ownership of businesses by workers to put automation in the hands of people - rather than let automation be their replacement in the hands of their bosses.

Meanwhile, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has focused on the state role. McDonnell, talking at a Manchester anti-austerity event, spoke of a renewed drive for public investment as the first step to anchoring technology to people and their interests.

It was left to the Labour National Youth Conference to contribute the third integral component, with the future of the Labour Party backing a motion in support of the universal basic income.

The motion acknowledged both the problems with Britain's welfare system and the concerns for the future being raised by the rise of automation. To answer these, the LNYC motion presented the basic income.

The basic income is a universal form of welfare, a payment received - with very little bureaucracy - by all citizens. It is designed to cover the basic essentials of life, so as to end poverty and it's coercive power over how people choose to live.

Labour usually falls in with the same basic conceit, shared by most right wing liberal groups, social democrats and worker's parties: that life begins and ends with work - or rather, with wage labour. That work of this sort is a fundamental component and an axiom in the building of any social model.

Work, to 'earn' the right to live in exchange, is treated as a value. As a moral component essential to any social contract. But for progressives, this cannot be the last word.

If we are to have true social progress, we must start first with a base of no poverty and no homelessness. We must begin with the right to live. If we care about choice, about liberty and justice, we must not let coercion remain the starting point for engaging with society.

For the Labour Party in particular, embrace of that wage labour conceit verges on hypocrisy - the party of workers buying into the 'moral value' of 'working for a living'.

There has not been nearly enough scepticism of it, or recognition that it is a value of limited scope. Restricted to the specific benefits it delivers within a specific social system. A system in which even certain forms of work are prioritised above others, and were these forms of work are made nearly mandatory.

Right now there is a crisis in welfare - but not the way the Conservatives think. The crisis in welfare is one of dignity. Conservative cuts have strangled Britain's social security safety net.

That has left vulnerable people at the hands of an exploitative market and put through probing, demoralising, assessments by organisations with weak ethical codes and goals that run counter to the wellbeing of people who desperately need support.

If Labour are really going to reform this country, to tackle these kinds of injustice, they first need to get the foundations right. By no means is basic income a panacea. But it is a fairer and less coercive starting point for a society.

As more and more work becomes automated, as paid work becomes more scarce, we need that fairer starting point as a basis upon which to build a new kind of relationship between people and society - one that acknowledges, from the start, their basic right to live.

Government, Parliament and the Centralisation of Power: If stability is what you want, you must resist the Government's attempts to strip power from Parliament

Parliament is back in session this week and the neverending turmoil inside the Conservative Party continues. In doing so, it exposes one of the primary weaknesses of a presidential system - and one of the reasons why the UK doesn't have one.

Or rather, why the UK doesn't have a presidential system in theory, at least. During the Tory conference, Theresa May's disastrous speech contained an apology for running too presidential an election campaign. But the grounds for such a campaign have been long in the preparing and only exposes the dramatic shift towards the centralising of decision-making at westminster.

This is a trend stretching back decades and is one of those trends for which New Labour were particularly criticised for not reversing. Even while some powers have been devolved, the Cabinet has continued to accumulate power at the expense of Parliament.

Theresa May's Government has threatened the most drastic veer into excluding Parliament in recent times, with parts of the Brexit Bill. The bill sparked controversy for potentially allowing the Government, embodied in the Cabinet, to make major changes to the law - even to the constitution - without first submitting them to Parliament for scrutiny and vote.

There defense amounted to 'we'll be responsible with that power', but that isn't enough. This is just the latest step in a long term trend. Parliament has been getting weaker for decades and with it has come a, perhaps unintended, consequence: instability.

In the strictest terms, the constitutional and governmental powers of the United Kingdom are vested in Parliament. It is the supreme authority in state. Collectively, the power of the state is embodied by - primarily - the Members of Parliament in the House of Commons.

Theresa May promised a state that was strong and stable centred on her personal rule. So did David Cameron. And neither on them has been able to deliver. In the late twentieth century and the early part of the new millenium, there were brief periods when the winds were just right, or the two party system rigid and exclusive enough, that singular leaders could stick around for a while.

But betting on stability rooted in the personal longevity of a single person would get you long odds and for good reason. Power embodied in a single person or a single party is inherently unstable, because their power base is fundamentally just a fraction of the people of a country.

That the power of state is, in theory, vested in Parliament is above all a reflection of the futility minority rule. Theresa May can never offer stability if power is not rooted in inclusive, democratic assemblies.

As her speech showed, power hangs on a thread. A persistent cough can weaken the power of one person. And if that person must embody the state and all it's people and power, you start down a dark road that leads nowhere good.

When the Brexit Bill returns, MPs - especially Tories - must be brave enough to resist to flagrant concentration of power. If for nothing else, to put an end to a trend that has guaranteed a near permanent condition of instability that affects everyone.

The Opposition: The progressive parties have begun to look outwards again, but cooperation is still far away

The opening fortnight of Britain's political conference season was all about the opposition. First the Liberal Democrats and then the Labour Party took their turns to gather, talk policy and present their priorities to the country.

There were two notable currents: the first was a focus on calling out others for their failings, rather than presenting plans that can fix those problems; the second was the lack of some common progressive goodwill.

The Liberal Democrat conference came first. The most prominent product was the acceptance by leader Vince Cable, on behalf of the party, that they must do right by students, with a plan now in the works to back a graduate tax to replace tuition fees.

That aside, the Lib Dem conference was policy light. The focus turned instead to establishing who the party opposes, which it turns out is a long list - and included Jeremy Corbyn and the supposed 'hard left' that surround him.

What Cable did however do, was put forward an outline of a government committed to the fair taxation of wealth, to public & private sector cooperation, and a government prepared to intervene to correct market failures - laying out a centre-left stance for the Lib Dems that leaves plenty of room for progressive cooperation.

The Labour conference provided a little more in the way of policy. However, the announcements didn't stretch far beyond the limits of the 2017 manifesto. John McDonnell said that Labour intend to tackle PFI and end it's siphoning of public sector resources.

There was also a plan announced to tackle credit card debt, along the same lines as pay day loans - by capping the maximum interest that can be accrued on debts owed.

In his leader's speech, Jeremy Corbyn followed Cable's lead and had criticism for many - including the right-wing press and the US President. He said that the country had become more brutal and less caring under this Conservative 'regime'.

Corbyn too stated values on which progressives can work together. On froeign policy, Corbyn argued that rhetoric must be wound down, that dialogue must be opened, that peace must be pursued and cooperation must be at the heart. He argued that the British values of democracy and human rights could be deployed selectively.

However, the leader speeches of both Corbyn and Cable focused on laundry lists of people deserving criticism. Cable even took shots at Corbyn and his leadership, criticising the 'hard left' drift of the Labour Party under the long time Islington North MP.

Corbyn didn't bother to mention the Lib Dems, but - from Labour's point of view - that's hardly a surprise. Labour still see the Lib Dems as rivals and, at present, vanquished rivals that are beneath their notice.

The continued lack of some sort of common goodwill between progressive parties is disappointing, though not surprising. No one ever said that building a progressive alliance would be easy. But taking shots at each other is a waste of breath.

It is also doubly negative. On the one hand it serves to divide opposition to the Tories. While on the other it also ignores how close on policy the two largest (historical) progressive parties are to one another.

The division between their manifestos in 2017 was as just thin as it has been since the 1920s. The Liberal Democrats and Labour pursue similar goals and even take a similar economic approach, rooted in Keynesian thinking.

Herein lies the fundamental problem of the left: the inability to prioritise what we have in common, over what would be a cause for division - a failure to develop a dialogue that allows for dissent to live alongside cooperation.

It is good to see the opposition parties looking outward again, rather than turning in on themselves. The narrative around Corbyn has already begun to shift, to morph into something that accepts him, and crafts a place for the movement in the conventional order.

However, the long term future of the left, of progressive politics, lies in building dialogue. And, hopefully, upon that foundation then cooperation and ultimately an alliance between progressives.