Is a blend of progressive liberalism and ethical socialism possible?
THIS TIME NO MISTAKES How to remake Britain
WILL HUTTON 448pp. Apollo. £25 (paperback, £10.99).
THE UNITED KINGDOM is days away from a likely Keir Starmer government, but rather further from knowing what that means. Most of the voters who the polls suggest will soon sweep him to power would struggle to come up with many – or any – things he will change. His very ascendancy reduces the incentive to reveal more of his real thinking. Rationally enough, Starmer instead emphasizes symbols such as patriotic flags on St George’s Day. But there was a hint, if not of his own ideas, then at least of the sorts of ideas he fancies b e i n g a s s o c i a t e d w i t h , w h e n h e m a d e a surprise appearance at the London launch in April of Will Hutton’s new book, This Time No Mistakes.
Back in 1995 Hutton became the pre-eminent sage of British social democracy with The State We’re In, a smash-hit manifesto for replacing Thatcherism with “a stakeholder society”. New Labour was initially keen, but – around the time Tony Blair flew out to confer with Rupert Murdoch on Hayman Island that same summer – he dropped the “stakeholder” buzzword. For all his undoubted subsequent achievements on public services, Blair did not fundamentally overhaul Britain’s political economy: a lightly regulated City only loomed larger as the New Labour years progressed; union membership rates drifted down; company managers retained their singular duty to maximize “value” for diffuse, fleeting owners. All these things went undisturbed – at least, until the old model came unstuck thanks to the credit crunch.
Therein lies the most obvious “mistake” of Hutton’s title – but his new book is not chiefly a relitigation of arguments from the 1990s. Instead it traces the tribulations and (far rarer) triumphs of progressive forces in the UK since the formation of the Liberal Party in 1859. The author’s frustrations with Blair are thus placed in deep context, as one instance of a recurrent and very British pattern.
One galloping passage on the origins of the “iron grip” of laissez-faire economics illustrates the book’s extraordinary range, covering, in four pages: the returns on a spinning jenny; the slave trade; Sir Edward Coke’s Petition of Right (1628); the Glorious Revolution; the creation of joint stock companies, the Stock Exchange and the Bank of England; and Waterloo. We meet the thinkers who exposed the flaws of hands-off governance: J. M. Keynes and William Beveridge, of course, but also the now little-read T. H. Green and R. H. Tawney, who laid bare “the acquisitive society”, distinguishing “functional” private property, such as craftsmen’s tools and peasant
