Tony Wright may not be the best known member of the British parliament, but the highly respected politician is arguably its most important back bencher. He has been the chair of the deceptively bland-sounding Public Administration Select Committee for the past ten years, and many would say he holds the government to account better than Her Majesty’s official opposition.

Wright is a thinker as well as a doer. Before entering parliament he lectured in politics at the University of Birmingham, and he continued to mix theory and practice after he entered parliament in 1992. He wrote one of the books which helped refashion the thinking of the Labour Party in the 1990s, Socialisms Old and New (1996), and co-edits The Political Quarterly, a journal which has acted as “a conduit between policy-makers, commentators and academics” since its founding in 1930.

Wright’s only brush with formal philosophy came as part of his philosophy, politics and economics degree at the London School of Economics. “I’ve always been interested in the history of political ideas,” he told me in his office in Westminster’s Portcullis House, but “I’m wholly unsuited to be a philosopher because I have trouble with concepts and logic. I remember doing logic at university and finding it impenetrable.”

Nor was it ideas that led him to politics in the first place. “I just grew up into a culture that was the labour movement. It just came with the post-war orange juice. It was only subsequently that I started reading and finding out why I was where I was politically.

“I remember particularly being interested in a course at the LSE called contemporary political ideas; it was run by the father of the Millibands, Ralph Milliband. Milliband gave me an essay back on Lenin’s The State and Revolution and he said, ‘The trouble with you, Wright, is that you’re fundamentally a liberal.’ I thought this was a crushing thing to say at the time. In retrospect, I’m rather pleased by it.”

In parliament, however, Wright has found that a serious interest in ideas is the exception rather than the rule.

“I think the thought side is often a disability in the routine world of politics, particularly the way that we do politics here. It doesn’t do to be too reflective, you just have to know which side you’re on and who to cheer for really, and it just complicates matters to be able to see two sides of a question.”

Is that just an inevitable part of politics that we have to live with, or is a more balanced kind of politics possible?

“I would very much like to do politics differently. I’ve always thought we don’t do a great service to politics by the way we do things here. It’s as though we don’t have any history, as though issues didn’t start before today; it involves a sort of tribalism which makes it very difficult to have sensible discussion of issues. I think there’s a mismatch between that and how most people talk about these things outside.”

Wright gives a vivid example of how unintellectual British politics has become, and how it needn’t be that way.

“A couple of years ago we were discussing the religious hatred bill, and I was unhappy about the threat to free speech involved in that. It seemed to me that you had absolutely to preserve the right of people to attack belief systems, and indeed to hate belief systems, if they deserve to be hated.

“But I remember in one of the debates here I found myself quoting Mill, and I just realised how odd that was, and how embarrassing it was. It was Mill about not shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, trying to say when the principles of free speech should be defended and when they shouldn’t be. A hundred years ago, or fifty years ago, I suspect in debates in the Commons here, it would have been pretty routine to have found people like Mill and Burke being cited regularly. It’s completely absent now. I think people would not know what you were talking about, not any more.”

Wright acknowledges that there is serious thinking going on in politics, but he says it tends go on “away from the sharp end of power”. It also “goes through phases. There have been periods when people have been interested in what you might call applied philosophy. For example, there was a huge interest in communitarianism during the period when new Labour was being put together and I think it was trying to suck ideas in from all directions. I think the interest at the moment is more in the impact of behavioural economics and psychology on politics, the currently trendy books, all these nudge books and such like. I don’t know if we’ll ever find ourselves in a moment when people feel a need for a bit of philosophical reflection.”

One problem seems to be that, when in power, leaders look to ideas for instrumental reasons. Tony Blair, for example, wrote a preface for Socialisms Old and New because, Wright thinks, “he wanted to think that what he was about had some sort of intellectual underpinnings to it.”

“Political leaders in a hurry – it sounds wrong to say they want a veneer of theoretical and philosophical cover, but in a sense they do want to know what they’re doing. I think Tony Blair was very much of that kind. I think he wanted people who could quickly situate some of the politics he wanted to do in some sort of intellectual tradition, and of course it doesn’t quite work like that. Intellectuals are unhelpful people on the whole, because they’ll always tell you about there being many sides to a question and how things are all very difficult. That’s not what politicians on the whole want.”

Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, seems more genuinely interested in matters intellectual. But he too suffers from being a man in a hurry. Wright recalls the time when the Labour Party leadership was trying to revise clause four of its constitution, which committed the party “To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

“Gordon Brown suggested to me that I might put together a collection of political writings to show that people on the left believed in things other than clause four,” recalls Wright. “I was struck by the fact that Gordon Brown was interested in ideas and indeed as I talked to him about it, his room was laden with books of everything – economic theory, political philosophy. I’m not sure that he’d read them, but he knew they were important. He kind of tossed them at me and said, ‘Look, I’m sure there’s something in here that we ought to put in.’ So we did produce a book in rapid time, called Values, Visions and Voices. But Gordon being a politician was only really interested in it, I think, for the purpose that it performed at the time. But, again, that’s the nature of politics these days.”

Wright’s account of the role of thinking in politics sounds a little like a lament. But he accepts there is something to the view that the whole Platonic idea of a philosopher king is actually a nightmare, and that the last people you want to be running things are the people who take ideas seriously. Perhaps it’s right and proper that the people who are prepared to engage with the complexity are a couple of steps back from the frontline.

For instance, Wright recalls when Labour came to power in 1997 and the founder and director of the think tank Demos, Geoff Mulgan, “suddenly found himself running policy in Downing Street” and “made a kind of public lament” about how unuseful all that policy wonkery was. “He said something like, this is the moment when we’ve got a chance to do something, now tell me, having thought all those thoughts, what is it we should be doing? And answer came there none.”

One possible explanation of this is that the bridges between theory and practice are not always where you expect to find them. For example, the Public Administration Select Committee sounds like an ideas-free zone, which “examines the quality and standards of administration within the Civil Service and scrutinizes the reports of the Parliamentary and Health Ombudsman.” It sounds managerial, but Wright argues that to take that view would be misguided.

“What has interested me greatly is trying to distil some of the principles behind what we do when we do things to the machinery of government, when we fiddle about with the constitution, when we organise public services. I’ve always been interested in getting to the bottom of what principles inform all this, and to make sure that things we recommend in turn have some basis in an approach that was reasonably coherent. So I’d like to think that is what’s informed our work over the years and has given us some credibility.

“I’m interested in how political systems work, I’m interested in how constitutions operate, the principles that they contain and how they are supposed to deliver those. In the British context that is quite fascinating because we don’t have a formal set of constitutional arrangements, we make things up as we go along and it’s been a period when people have been more interested in these sorts of things. So we’ve tried to interrogate some of this. We were the first people, I think, to look at prerogative powers. No one really knew what they were and we got the government to try to write them down, which had never been done before, and that in turn leads to arguments about how you might make sure that parliament has votes when the country is taken to war. So you start off in a rather abstract, highfalutin way, but you get some practical pay-offs.”

Another bridge between political ideas and action is The Philosophical Quarterly. However, it is increasingly difficult to find “material that is written by people who know what they’re talking about, but which is written in a way which is publicly accessible.”

“We’re just producing an 80th birthday volume of our greatest hits at the moment and going back and reading the archives, reading all the early stuff, you really did have the big names of the day, the big thinkers of the day in different areas who were writing in forms that anybody could understand. I think you’ve lost a huge amount of that now. You’ve got academics these days, certainly in the social sciences, who are either uninterested or incapable of writing about issues that people understand in a language that people understand. They write in archaic languages: no sentence can be written unless it’s got some sort of reference contained in it. I’ve got a thing about this. In some respects we’ve lost a role of the traditional public intellectual that was routine in Britain. It’s being kept alive in certain quarters, but with great difficulty.”

This is not helped by invisible walls in academia, for instance, between someone in a politics department who has an interest in theory and someone in a philosophy department who’s a political philosopher.

“My impression of the academic world is that these things are increasingly disaggregated,” says Wright. “Even disciplines that the outside world thinks are cognate are not, and people just work in these different bunkers.”

Wright’s own intellectual work is very much, as he puts it, “at the crossover between political ideas and political practice.” His PhD was centred around GDH Cole, Guild Socialism, and related ideas that were circulating in the first decades of the twentieth century, when there were “some fascinating arguments about the nature of democracy and about the nature of the state.”

These “forced people on the left to think quite critically about the nature of the state and to start thinking about how you might have a socialism which was not statist, and that was the whole point about guild socialism. But it also got the Fabian tradition thinking similarly about it, in quite innovative ways.”

One idea which hatched in this “fertile period” was liberal socialism, a phrase coined by L.T. Hobhouse and endorsed by Wright in Socialism Old and New.

“It was a coming together of traditions and a real engagement between traditions, and forging the kind of politics which was attractive: building on the insights of a socialist tradition in terms of economic power and social justice, and the insights of a liberal tradition in terms of the need to protect and nourish individuality, freedom and so on.”

Wright saw liberal socialism as highly relevant to our times. “When we had the great discussion on the left in the 1970s and 1980s, when a traditional social democracy seemed to have run into the buffers and the right was resurgent and so on, people go back and they try to explore traditions to find things that they find are useful. I was trying to argue at that time that there was a tradition worth presenting. It seemed to me to feed quite nicely into what people like Giddens were arguing about a third way politics. What liberal socialism was doing was something not unlike what new Labour was trying to do in the 1980s: trying to say you can have a market economy but you can also have a socially just society, whereas for a long time we had operated on the basis that these sat in different categories. It was actually the mingling of these things which I thought was interesting. And it did recapture that earlier period.”

But although Wright thought that “at its best that was what third wayism was all about”, the reality was not always as he wanted it. “In practice, you get immersed in realpolitik, and 24 hour news, and winning elections, and being popular and all the rest of it. But I think there is something there which is pretty close to what now we’re calling the new social democracy. Everyone’s interested, after this meltdown which is going on at the moment, in what kind of politics will emerge. And I think it will probably be a new sort of social democracy which understands the need both for the state and also for the state to operate in really quite new ways.”

Indeed, Wright retains an optimism that rigorous thinking about politics may yet have a future. “I think politics can be interesting again now. There’s an interesting moment when some people on the left think this is a moment when we can get rid of markets and just re-embrace the state, and there are other people on the right who think that the state is in such trouble financially that a massive rolling back of the state will have to go on, and it’s our moment. So you’ve got both left and right who think ‘it’s our moment’ and I suspect it won’t be the moment quite for either of them. But it may be the moment for some interesting ideas in the middle.”

Julian Baggini is editor of tpm