Nor will the vision open

EU membership will bring opportunities, not manna from heaven, said a very pleased prime minister after parliament's ratification of the Treaty of Athens. Manna is not the only thing that will not come with membership, however. Neither will a progressive political vision - not necessarily, anyway.

Sweden's prime minister, Goeran Persson, reminded British readers last week that the Union stands for high welfare ambitions, low inequality, and an ecological economy. It also stands for peaceful political cooperation with non-European countries, but it has yet to become effective in this field.

These standards by themselves, however, do not make up a progressive political vision.

For one thing, you can get more than one vision out of them, and one or two are not progressive. For another, you might get little or no vision, but only waffle. Both points were sharply made by critics of the "progressive governance" conference, held last weekend in London and which Mr Persson attended.

The 500-odd centre-left leaders and thinkers who attended included Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, and Presidents Lula of Brazil and Mbeki of South Africa. What was most striking about the gathering was the contrast between the intellectual confidence of these leaders and the difficulties each is facing at home - difficulties to do with policies, delivery and crises.

Some social democrat leaders - say, the Italian and Portuguese - have recently been thrown out of government by voters. Others - like the Greek social democrats - will only be saved from looming electoral defeat by a miracle; although Mr Schroeder was, of course, the beneficiary of one - a flood of Old Testament proportions.

But now Mr Schroeder faces considerable structural difficulties at home. Mr Blair's problems are lighter, but his vision of a UK in the eurozone seems to be fading fast. The jury is still out on President Lula of Brazil: he has enough popular credit for people to think that he might push through enough reforms to reduce the obscene inequality in his country, although so far the reforms he is pressing are the ones bankers are urging. As for President Mbeki, he governs a country where the average individual life-span is shorter today than it was 30 years ago.

Faced with these politicians, not to mention the haziness of some of the talks, critics spoke of waffle and drift. But the graver criticism was that these leaders are indeed overseeing reforms - even radical reforms - but that these are not at all progressive. Rather, they are the sort of neo-liberal reforms, begun by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which reinforce if not increase current inequalities.

In short, the charge is that they are conservative reforms. There is a common misconception that conservatives do not innovate. But they often do: they find new ways of distributing power and wealth so that elites do not carry the main burden of necessary structural reforms.

So, radical reforms do not necessarily mean progressive reforms. To get the latter you need political will. And the difficulty of summoning it was illustrated by the flailing gestures of the great and the good of the world's centre-left in London.

But how much of this is relevant to Malta? Surely, mere delivery of EU standards would constitute progress in this country? Not quite.

I do not wish to be misunderstood. Those critics of this government who harp upon delivery and decent standards of service have my sympathy along with everyone else's. But just as it is important to distinguish between radical reforms and progressive ones, it is also important to point out that some forms of delivery can be anti-progressive in their effect.

Take something delivered during the election campaign. The prime minister, with minister and parliamentary secretary in train, graced the opening of a new wing of an elderly people's residence in Zejtun. The trumpeted achievement was the radical multiplication of the space and beds at this residence. And yet, large residences go against the government's own policy, which favours several small ones.

The official policy has good, solid reasons to back it - to do with current standards of professional care. Deviating from this policy, which concerns a growing proportion of the population, was in one important sense a retrograde step.

Somewhere along the line from vision to delivery, a breach was opened. As this government advances in age, such breaches are more likely to occur. Over-worked secretariats, bogged down daily in a series of urgent-but-unimportant matters, not to mention emergencies, live a hand-to-mouth existence. The prospect of EU membership has already increased their load. They might well not notice if vision and delivery get divorced, and if they did they might not have enough time to care.

Someone else needs to be delegated with developing this government's political vision - the same progressive vision that animated its application to join the EU 13 years ago. This someone will need to explain this vision and protect it against the wear and tear of daily pressures. Otherwise, whatever reasonable rate of delivery it might manage to engineer, the government could find itself staring, nonplussed, at an electorate that considers it, possibly quite rightly, adrift.