New Labour is still hurting. The latest Guardian/ICM published on Monday showed the Tories remaining solid at 41% of the vote. The centre-left (such as it is) is now split between the incumbents (25%) and the Liberal Democrats (19%).

The Unlikelihood of Labour Recovery

New Labour has now been in steady though not precipitate decline since the beginning of the year while the Liberal Democrats appear to be incapable of moving very far forward under the somewhat lacklustre leadership of Nick Clegg.

What is striking is that the vote for 'others' (a range of Left, Green, nationalist and far Right parties) has maintained (after a dip) its slow rise since the June European & Local Elections.

Although not yet a serious alternative to the three main parties (except regionally), it indicates that protest is still growing at the conduct of the political class. On current trend, this vote could become greater than that of the Liberal Democrats somewhere between the end of 2009 and next late Spring.

The point is not that there is any serious challenger to any mainstream party (although we still consider UKIP to be a serious counterpart to the Scottish National Party in Southern Britain) but that the Conservative Party has managed its 'shift to the left' in a way that is now seen as credible.

This raises the issue of what that 'shift to the left' really means. Cameron's strategy was undertaken at enormous internal risk. The core Middle Britain vote of the Tories (equivalent on the Right to the solid Labour core of New Labour) is far from moderate and centrist and yet the bulk of it has stayed loyal.

But is the Tory Party Progressive?

Hardline tax cutters and privatisers may be migrating to UKIP or even hoping that Mandelson might revive a Blairite New Labour but the vigorous defence by Cameron and his team of the NHS is clearly winning or holding more votes than it is losing them.

Just as the term conservative is becoming redefined, or rather to be returning to the 'one nation' inclusive ideology of the era before Thatcher, so the term 'progressive' (a late import from the US to replace the uncomfortable word 'socialist') is up for grabs.

Actually, 'progressive' might easily be redefined as 'interfering liberal' by many Brits - as state interference without the redistributive and investment strategies of socialism - if they thought about such things very much. What Osborne and Mandelson each means by progressive is very different.

A lot of the unpopularity of the Government must be put down to its petty authoritarianism, its managerialism, its target-setting, its implicit political correctness and, amongst males and some females, the phenomenon that is Harriet Harman. This is 'progressivism' as it should be technically understood.

Exploring the Progressive Mentality

Politics Home published a poll on which party might be called most progressive earlier this month. This begged the question of what respondents thought progressive meant - we suspect many just meant 'forward-looking' but Politics Home did try to define the term.

The definition of progressive here is, regardless of party orientation, one of reform and modernisation with a dash of enterprise and enlightenment. The difficulty for New Labour is that its ideological progressives may not be very modern nor effective reformers from the perspective of most voters.

If the poll is to be believed, although most respondents did not think that any of the mainstream parties were progressive by this definition, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats could both claim 22% of the respondents - and Labour, the ostensible leading party of the Left, only 12%.

Anyone who spends any time amongst Labour activists knows full well that all but the most loyal are in despair and not just at the coming loss of power. The 25% overall vote for New Labour hides a very large minority who plan to vote for the Party only for fear of something worse.

Some cling to the 'very real achievements' (a stock phrase) of twelve years of rule but the list is scarcely impressive when set against the knowledge that massive public spending cuts are inevitable. Many of these cuts must reverse many of the gains for Labour's constituency even if Labour is returned.

The majority will now be looking back over the last dozen years and ask what exactly was progressive (except in the most restricted and ideological sense of the word) about New Labour's tenure.

Labour Progressivism

From the point of view of the activists of the 1970s who now dominate the Party great things were done - liberal interventionism overseas, the first steps towards positive discrimination, the equality and human rights agenda, extension of union rights, the greater if often covert engagement with Europe.

Unfortunately (for the bedrock of the Party), fundamental issues of permanent redistribution have only been rediscovered in the last few months and they are still seen as cultural and social issues rather than economic policy matters. Social mobility is not the same as economic security or equality.

The New Labour agenda remains the re-building of the existing economic system so that the cream can be skimmed off and redistributed as grants from the centre.

Since so much of that grant money goes on a social and cultural agenda, many workers and managers remain extremely vulnerable to the realities of the next year - the paradox of a technical recovery with huge cuts in public spending, higher taxes and increasing fear if not always actuality of unemployment.

This helps to explain why the Tories are successfully managing to sell themselves, as a 'one nation party' that will have to raise taxes, to a population that wants an economy that is more sustainable than the credit-fuelled mania and then crash of the last half of New Labour's rule.

It also gets us back to the debate between Mandelson and Osborne over who is the most 'progressive'.

Progressive Varieties

If by 'progressive', we mean a US-style liberal agenda, then the small educated minority that cares about these things will fluctuate to its taste between New Labour and the Liberal Democrats. This is the much-maligned Guardian readership.

If, however, you mean (as most British respondents will have understood the term) that a party must have an idea of where the country must go in the interests of all its people, then most people may have little faith in politicians but are increasingly prepared to give the Tories the benefit of the doubt.

What they will no longer accept is that New Labour is anything more than a failed tribal coalition that got it wrong once and is likely to get it wrong again (and do so across many policy fronts).

Meanwhile, from the Marxist wing of the Left comes the most acute criticism yet of the wider failure of the centre-left to adjust to the increased prosperity but also the increased anomie of the world of the last great economic cycle (from the 1970s to the 2000s).

David Edgar (in yet another Guardian contribution to this posting) makes a sustained attack on ideological progressives from the Left that is very hard to answer.

Since '68, a generation of middle class activists has ditched redistributive values and its hundred year alliance alliance with the poor and disadvantaged and it has adopted a strategy of seizing the State to impose its liberal values on a population that has grown resentful of its presumption.

The International Dimension

Edgar has the courage to point out that the young 'heroes' of Tehran are not quite so heroic when seen in this light. We add that the drive to spread a centralised liberal progressivism across the globe is, in essence, an export of American urban liberal values that substitutes freedom for equality at every point.

The core of the global progressive revolution started in the universities of the Atlantic system forty years ago and its activists achieved power in the West during the 1990s. This was the golden era of international progressivism and its evil twin neo-conservatism.

But the model for progressive politics is surprisingly reactionary - it is an organised seizure of the State machine by vanguard groups with an agenda of cultural change. Using mass marketing techniques, they achieved their ends but the agenda alienated the populations over which they now rule.

Given the hedonism of '68 and the use of liberal economics to finance the 'revolution', it is no accident that this generation has now foundered on economic collapse and cultural resentment - nor that resistance to the liberal capitalist system is centred on traditionalism and the populist Right.

For the 'damnes de la terre', the liberal agenda offers very little other than patronising aid, trickle-down economics, migration to the factories, weakening social provision and cultural rule by foreign educated and undemocratic or manipulative business school elites.

It is no wonder that the economically vulnerable have a trust issue with America (globally), the centre-left (within the democratic allies of America) and liberals (in the non-democratic pro-Western world). A progressive world looks less attractive the further that you travel from the US Presidential Suite.

The Core of the Matter

So let's get back to the core of the matter. The progressive agenda is now devalued currency. If it means a general commitment to the public good in the interests of all (essentially the position of Obama), then it now becomes the property of any democratic 'one nation' political movement.

From this perspective, Osborne is right and Mandelson is wrong - the Tories are now more progressive than New Labour.

But if it means the uptight socially manipulative agenda of small elites deeply frightened by democracy and its effects on their control of the levers of power, then new media technologies and the decline into political dotage of the current generation are slowly consigning it to the scrap heap of history.

From this perspective, Mandelson is right and Osborne is wrong - New Labour is still far more progressive than the modern Conservative Party.