The state we're in

What sort of state do we want the English state (for we now have devolved government) to be?

Surely no one except David Miliband could have failed to enjoy John Humphrys' trussing up of Ed Miliband on Today, while wondering how such an inept debater could rise so high. And at least once Miliband volunteered himself to be tied in knots. The Tories, he said accusingly, believed in a small state. Ah, said Mr Humphrys, so you believe in a large state. No, no, protested Mr Miliband feebly. Humphrys gave him a couple of chances to get out of the mess he'd made for himself, but it was too easy sport so he moved on.

Michael Gove in today's Telegraph returns to the role of the state from a different angle. In a quite nicely written piece he is taking on the government's flirting with allocating school places by lottery. At the core of the article is the excellent Conservative proposal to empower parents in their school choices.

Gove sugars the pill with populism which is so incoherent that it would be tedious to dissect it. To take just one example, we should, he says, be "asking why, after 10 years of massive spending, there still aren't enough good school places". But there will always be some schools which are better than others. Unless you label them all "good" (which would make the term pointless), most parents will want to send a child to a school which is "good" (in the sense of the best locally available). So parents will always want to be able to choose.

Nor does he choose to explain how his proposal would work.

We aim to give all parents the right that currently only the rich have - to take their child out of a failing school and place them in a good one.

Suppose the school doesn't want the child? Will the good local school want to take a disruptive bully? And what if no schools within travelling distance want to accept a particular child?

However, the core policy is right, and Mr Gove is right in seeing the lottery proposal as a politically juicy target. It's an idea which could only appeal to a doctrinaire bureaucrat or politician. It would disempower people in one of the key decisions of their lives.

So is the state there for us, or are we there for it? Titter ye not, the question isn't as daft as that bald formulation makes it sound. For example, Labour tries to justify its claim that there's an economic gain from high immigration by focusing on the increase in the overall size of the economy, rather than on any effect on individual incomes per head. Of course it's harder to make the case that the indigenous population benefit economically as individuals from large-scale immigration (and some poorly paid people clearly don't), but the emphasis is on the collective rather than the individual.

So for education the Labour thrust is to make parents passive acceptors of whatever The State chooses to provide, with no say in its provision - in Gove's words, passive playthings of the system. "We just have to wait and see what we're given by the bureaucracy."

This is a curious contrast with Labour's bizarre slogan of creating a personalised health service, where the individual will be able to make choices. But not in education, apparently.

Under Conservative proposals, says Gove, parents, not bureaucrats, would have effective control over the money that is spent on their children.

That would create a real incentive for schools to listen to what parents want, instead of making parents feel that the only way they'll have control over their children's schooling is if they're rich enough to pay for it.

Note for Ed Miliband: the state would remain the same size. Its services would just have to give people on the ground what they wanted, rather than what the anonymous, unaccountable, faddist bureaucratic "experts" decreed to be the latest thing to be good for them, whether it was a French exam with no oral, compulsory schooling for restless teenage boys until they were 18, or the film of An Inconvenient Truth containing convenient lies.