The ever-loving Polly Toynbee (boldface mine):

It comes down to the divide between right and left. Labour is by nature the party of big government and should never apologise for it. Spending more means hiring more people: numbers of staff employed is often cause for celebration, not shame. But the left often colludes with the right in denigrating government. Its unthinking, anti-establishment, mindset instinctively fights against "the system" as if "officialdom" was always an oppressive power.

But government is the only tool there is. In the right hands* it can transform society. It is a force for progress, for redistribution, for putting right wrongs, for redressing the injustices of the market - and for making that market work better by opening up competition.

Yet the notion that "they" are to be resisted is almost as deep-dyed in leftwing as in rightwing ideology - a hangover from Che Guevara myth-making romanticism of the 1960s, that free rebel with his bandolier holding out against petty rules and regulations. It bleeds into the rightwing mythology of the stalwart individual against the Godzilla state.

So who is there to embrace government as the true expression of "us", of "we the people", of our will? Who is there to praise civil servants - on whom we depend and who are less well paid than the private sector? Who is to encourage the best and brightest of the young that this is where real cutting-edge change is made?

Too often the left's over-devotion to individual rights usurps what should be its natural role as the defender of the power of the state - and of its servants.