The Progressive Century: the future of the centre-left in Britain Edited by Neal Lawson and Neil Sherlock Palgrave, 256pp, £14.99 ISBN 0333949625

All credit to the editors, Neal Lawson and Neil Sherlock, for this enterprising and useful book. In good new Labour fashion, they - an early Labour "moderniser" and a former adviser to Paddy Ashdown respectively - have spotted a gap in the market and compiled nearly two dozen specially written essays on different aspects of "the progressive century", from philosophy to practical policy.

The title is meant to be forward-looking. In Britain in the 20th century, the progressive cause was notable above all else for its failure to offer anything resembling an attractive, workable programme for government - or governance, a good chattering-class word. The only mainstream party less successful at winning power than Labour was the Liberal Party. Even in May 1997, surely the most propitious time for either party in half a century, the best Labour could manage was 43.2 per cent of the vote - 1.3 per cent more than John Major's Conservative Party in 1992.

So, although it is in the nature of the progressive beast to be optimistic, we should not fall too easily for the idea that permeates every page of this collection: that there is a trapped progressive majority waiting to be allowed by proportional representation to hurry in a new political dawn. Kirsty Milne tries valiantly to make the case that the Scottish Parliament, with its coalitions and consensual rules of procedure, is doing just that.

New it is; but there are few sights more depressing than the latest tier of political timeservers and nonentities who strut around Scotland (or, in the case of the First Minister, Henry McLeish, around whichever country he can find to host a "state visit") as if the electorate should be grateful to have them, and to pay for them, simply because they are Scottish. Devolution may have been the "settled will" of Scotland, but nothing - not even 18 years of alien Conservative rule - has given the SNP a greater boost, or made the break-up of the UK a more likely and more immediate prospect.

It is one thing for a book on the progressive century to come to take a Panglossian view of recent events. But Lawson and Sherlock seem to live in a parallel universe when they write that "a new Welsh coalition also offers a ray of hope to progressives" and "there has been some extension to the work of the Joint Cabinet Committee into European defence and security policy, as well as United Nations reform". To most ordinary people - and certainly, according to opinion polls, to most Welsh people - the Welsh Assembly is just about the most tawdry and unnecessary example of the left's obsession with political structures. As for the Joint Cabinet Committee, Peter Shore once told me that the extent of his obligations to his Liberal shadow during the Lib-Lab pact was giving him a lift in his ministerial car. Plus ca change.

Beyond simple electoral mathematics and the myth of the natural anti-Conservative majority (a myth punctured by David Cowling's excellent chapter, "Is There a Progressive Electorate?"), no one answers the question: "Why?" The assumption throughout is that, because Labour and the Liberal Democrats stem from the same political roots, they ought not to be in competition.

Hold on a minute. Just as there are decent and foul Labour Party supporters and decent and foul Conservatives, so there are, despite their cuddly image, foul Liberal Democrats. In many inner-city areas, the Liberals provide the only real opposition to Labour, and their political principles amount to nothing more than being "not Labour". And that means that many of them are out-and-out racists (I had the unfortunate task of having to deal with them in east London for much of the 1990s). The Tower Hamlets Liberals' "Sons and Daughters" housing policy - which, if it had not been illegal, would have given sons and daughters of local (ie, white) residents priority - was a despicable piece of racist opportunism. And anyone who has encountered Liberals in by-elections knows just how dirty they fight.

I don't want a coalition with that type of Liberal. I don't even want to work closely with them. I want to defeat them. As for decent Liberal Democrats - if they are indeed liberal - then perhaps. But Philip Collins's incisive essay on the social market shows why today's Liberals do not deserve the label. He cites J A Hobson, the turn-of-the-century liberal thinker, who wrote in The Crisis of Liberalism that liberalism "will retain its distinction from socialism by taking for its chief test of policy the freedom of the individual citizen rather than the strength of the state". Admittedly, the Liberals are past masters at being a hundred things at once depending on their audience, but the Liberals of 2001 might have had as their electoral slogan "Vote Liberal to expand the state", so monotonous was the programme of rising tax and state provision - about as far from the ideals of liberalism as it is possible to get.

The Progressive Century is full of thought-provoking essays, most of them well written. It is worth reading even if you find, as I do, the whole notion of a natural alliance of progressives risible.

Stephen Pollard is a political writer and broadcaster

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