A CUNNING PLAN FOR THE LABOUR GOVERNMENT

During the recent election campaign, eligibility to govern became reduced in Tory political rhetoric to ‘having a plan’.    But isn’t central planning a feature of the big, interventionist State, anathema to true blue Conservatives?  And what ‘the plan’ was to achieve varied from stopping the boats to defeating Putin to growing the economy, all requiring well planned government action. 
  
The accusation of not having a plan was mainly directed at Sir Keir Starmer, bearer of the ‘Ming vase’ full of policy positions vulnerable to ambush.  He had good reason not to, as the French say, ‘vider son sac’ (speak his mind), confide in the public detailed policy priorities and how they would be implemented.   Not an ideal exercise of democracy but one necessary for any Party wishing to win a general election.  Faced with a right-wing Press and predatory social media, much of it supporting a collapsing ruling Party reduced to false claims and misrepresentation, hardly blameworthy.  And perhaps there was an unrevealed plan behind the reticence. 

We are now half-way through a political dance of the seven veils.  We’ve had the debates and interviews, a substantial Manifesto and Kings Speech, some elaboration of the new PM’s headline priorities, Rachel Reeves’ first speech to business leaders as Chancellor of the Exchequer with, shortly, her first speech in office to Parliament.  The new government is determined - and has been so for some time - to establish its credibility both nationally and internationally.  Something more than pragmatism, the makings of a plan, is appearing.  But the big picture and the economic and political philosophy that shapes it, what we arrive at when the 40 pieces of legislation in the King’ speech are put together, and implemented, remains still out of focus. 

When I turned over Will Hutton’s This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain, Bloomsbury, 2024, to find Sir Keir Starmer’s bonanza of a blurb on the back cover, “a brilliant book.... read it if you haven’t already”, it seemed to promise a sharper focus.  And indeed Will Hutton - former Principal of Oxford College, journalist and political economist, a former editor-in-chief of The Observer for which he writes a column - provides both a big picture and a detailed policy analysis.  The book gives a coherent intellectual and historical account of the mess we are in, how we got here, and how we might emerge. It looked like a strong contender for what New Labour Mark 2 is all about.
 
The headline formula Hutton applies is “an ethic of socialism with the best of progressive liberalism”.  By this he means ‘blending’ the dynamism of the market and the restless energy of capitalism with the values of “fellowship, solidarity, fairness and mutuality”, informing a social contract to protect citizens from the risks of uncontrolled capitalism.  Not a bad definition of social democracy or, come to that much of Catholic Social Teaching - though This Time No Mistakes never refers to this body of social thinking.  Probably wise in these secular times. 

Not surprisingly Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1908-1915) in the Liberal “great reforming government” that fought the Tory-dominated House of Lords to create national insurance and an old-age pension prior to the First World War, is an early example of what Hutton calls the politics of balancing the We with the I.   Then comes the Christian socialist, Richard Henry Tawney, who influenced much more than Anglican social thinking after the War.  Tawney’s friend from Toynbee Hall days (1903), and Liberal hero, was William Beveridge, whose expertise in social insurance was taken up by Atlee’s 1945 Labour government.  The other big name amongst the founding fathers of Hutton’s political economy is John Maynard Keynes who bequeathed Keynesian economics and the core belief that government intervention can stabilise economies.   Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal (1933-1938) which sought to remedy the Great Depression, economic recovery, reform of the financial system and help for the unemployed and impoverished, was profoundly influenced by Keynesian thinking.
 
Hutton describes how Harold Macmillan’s one-nation conservatism, support for the welfare state, his Keynesian approach, mixed economy with some nationalised industries and strong trades unions, represented a retention of a post-war consensus dominated by the thinking of his three heroes.  The Conservative belief that the free market, individual freedom and a minimal state is the correct formula for growth stands out in stark contrast Macmillan’s approach which was finally dropped by Margaret Thatcher who wished to counter a ‘culture of dependency’, denounced the idea that people should turn to Government to solve their problems, and for whom there was no such thing as society.  “There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first”.  Take away Thatcher’s pragmatism, add the last 14 years of government, and we end up with an extreme right-wing version of Toryism and its discontents that almost destroyed the Conservative Party. 

The second half of This Time No Mistakes, detailing policy prescriptions for reform and how we might escape from the present economic and social crisis, shows an extraordinarily deep grasp of our multiple problems, both financial and social, and the policy work of different Ministries.  The wide sweep of Hutton’s proposed reforms and institutional innovations, from restructuring pension funds to incentivising socially purposeful businesses committed to more than benefitting shareholders, makes them impossible to cover within a brief review like this.  Just read them. They may well have influenced the thinking of the Chancellor and the Prime Minister and should be the subject of a national conversation. 
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The rub is that most of Hutton’s proposals require funding either from government or private investors perhaps with the former leveraging the latter.  The UK’s current debts are eating up government revenue and Starmer is self-limited by tight fiscal restraints to funding small-scale initiatives with maximum impact.  Rachel Reeve is already having to find some wriggle-room. 
  
Credibility and Stability are the necessary first aims in the Labour plan.  Hutton’s comprehensive analysis and prescriptions possibly foreshadow much of what is to come.  It looks like being a long haul.  


See TheArticle 25/07/2024