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.”
Progressive projects in Britain, according to Hutton, fail when they mix this cocktail wrongly: Blair has too little of the ethic of socialism, Corbyn insufficient progressive liberalism. It brings Roy Jenkins to mind. But even the SDP botched “the elusive formula”.
“What would have pushed the SDP’s share of the vote past 30 per cent would have been a harder edge – a genuine fusing of New Liberalism and ethical socialism into a new progressive doctrine that had a bigger project in mind than merely being nicely moderate.” A verdict that has echoes of how some see the Starmer project.
Hutton is, unsurprisingly, fond of the Attlee government: combining giants of ethical socialism, such as Bevan and Bevin, with the New Liberal insights of Keynes and Beveridge. New Liberalism is a tradition that broke with laissez-faire liberalism, guided by Hobhouse, and influenced the economic interventionism and wealth redistribution of the People’s Budget of 1909/10. Ethical socialism is the egalitarianism of Tawney and Crosland that would have been Labour’s guiding philosophy if we ever really had one.
The split in the progressive parties between Labour and the Liberals, argues Hutton, made it harder than it otherwise would have been to find his winning blend. This division, Hutton hopes, must now be reconciled. In this sense, the book is reminiscent of David Marquand’s The Progressive Dilemma (1991).
With Labour enjoying a 174-seat majority, few Labourites now focus on relations with the Liberal Democrats. And the kind of political reforms that Hutton proposes, which might incubate closer relations between our parties: Replace the House of Lords with an elected Assembly of Nations, Regions and Cities with four-yearly elections held in between general elections to the House of Commons; Replace the first-past-the-post voting system with a proportional voting system; Entrench the powers of local government, cities and regions and underwrite the independence of the Civil Service.
Hutton wants reform of our economy that is as far-reaching as these reforms of our politics. On the eve of Rachel Reeves’ first Budget, these are perhaps closer to the kind of issues that Labour intends to frame this parliament.
“The sweet spot for any prosperous, well-run economy and society is the marriage of capitalist dynamism – which can deliver jobs, innovation and prosperity – with social cohesion, freedom and tolerance.”
The social cohesion comes from ethical socialism and the capitalist dynamism from New Liberalism – “a new fusion of the ‘We’ and the ‘I’ … Above all, we must learn to invest in ourselves and build the public and private institutions to do that. Strategically the task is to use much increased public investment within a credible fiscal framework supported by the reshaping of our savings and investment landscape in order to mobilise the hundreds of billions that are necessary to invest in a new generation of great companies and great infrastructure. Our institutional ‘plumbing’ must be organised to get the maximum multiplier impact on private investment from every pound of public investment”.
If this week’s Budget can secure this plumbing, then it will have earned the billing that Reeves has given it: a match for the greatest economic moments in Labour history.
The combination of the economic and political reforms sought by Hutton would be as transformational as FDR’s New Deal. Over the thirty years that followed the New Deal, “this world of managed capitalism and strong safety nets would see global and US output trebling, living standards rising and inequality falling to new lows … It was a liberal social democratic order that worked so well it seemed permanent”.
The revolutions of Reagan and Thatcher meant that it was not. The counter revolution of Hutton would be as dramatic.
It is a tall order for Starmer and Reeves. They need not only Hutton’s ideas. They need expert political judgment and management to successfully seed these ideas: the LBJ to Hutton’s FDR. It is an awful lot to calibrate to ensure that this time, no mistakes.
Jonathan Todd hosts an Evening with Will Hutton at 8pm on Tuesday this week at 1000 Trades, Birmingham. Tickets here.
Tags: 1000 Trades, Jonathan Todd, progressive ideas, rades, This time no mistakes, Will Hutton
