by Jonathan Todd
“Ideas matter; they are the indispensable precondition for action,” writes Will Hutton in This Time No Mistakes (2024). Hutton is well-known for advancing the ideas that animated early phases of the last Labour government. The State We’re In (1996) argued for stakeholder capitalism. This idea achieved insufficient purchase to avoid Britain now needing to be remade.
“It was a duck-and-weave administration,” laments of New Labour in his latest book, “looking for points of least resistance and choosing not to boast about achievements for fear of upsetting the centre-right ideological consensus, which in fact was in disarray.” This book’s title might be understood as meaning, “listen more carefully to me, incoming Labour government, than your predecessors and avoid their mistakes”.
It is much more ambitious than that. It is not simply proposing that the Starmer government learn the lessons of the Blair/Brown years. It wants the Starmer to absorb “the elusive formula of and for success” that Hutton deduces from the past 100 or so years.
“There needs to be a feasible progressivism that effectively combines an ethic of socialism with progressive liberalism … and is unapologetically optimistic about the possibility of universal progress and justice in the best traditions of the European enlightenment.”