I am  pleased to have a visionary running the Pension Ministry from both the DWP and HMT. This blog is from  07 July 2024 when I hoped he’d be appointed immediately. Friends who are on the inside suggested he’d need to understand the ways of departments – they suggested a year but politics has opened the door for Emma Reynolds and she’s now promoted. 

Pleased to see that my blog on Torsten Bell over the weekend was well read. I hope his new book is well read too as it is as close to as a detailed manifesto for change as we are going to get. I am not saying that Torsten Bell speaks for the Labour Government, but if that Government wants to articulate itself – as Blair’s did through Will Hutton’s “Stake-holding Society” in 1995, then it could do worse than promote Bell’s “Great Britain?”.

Hutton called our Britain as in crisis in 1995, Bell paints this period as one of sustained growth, falling waiting lists – a Britain about to embrace the title “Cool Britannia”. The Britain he pictures today has seen no personal and little economic growth over the past decade and a half, a nation suffering the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis which opened the door to Brexit and through austerity and the disinvestment paradoxically caused by QE, little or no growth in personal incomes or the economy.

It would be easy for Torsten Bell to offer us a view of Great Britain based on what we were in 1995 rather than what Britain is today and it is one of the strengths of the book that he doesn’t. Instead he paints a picture of an inclusive Britain that is at peace with its multi-culturism (unlike France) and has great strengths not as an industrial but a service economy. I suspect that Unite’s aim of holding Jonathan Reynold’s feet to the fire over Port Talbot job losses are at odds with this. One woman interviewed in Port Talbot yesterday said people from the steelworks wanted and were getting better jobs. Reynolds refused told the BBC that de-carbonisation didn’t mean de-industrialisation but he did not demand that a decarbonised steelworks re-employed 3,000 people.

The nostalgic view of a Great Britain is based on our returning to being an industrial nation , that is not “Great Britain?” as Bell sees it. He is now MP for Swansea West.

Being proud of what we have become

There is a jigsaw culture in our house, boxes of 1000 piece Gibson jigsaws are piled high. Each one asks to put together a picture of a rosy world of 1980s brands, of an Elizabethan royalty and of hippy festivals of yore. But the Britain of the 1970s and 1980s was a fearsome place. Read Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia to remind yourself of that.

For all the criticism of the “wokerati”, Britain is a fundamentally decent place where Nigel Farage has to apologise when his candidates show regressive tendencies. The expression of disgust that registered itself in the 14% of voters who sided with Reform is little more than a pressure valve compared with what we are seeing in Germany and France.  We have become a voter-empowered democracy where politicians are held to account for failure and where extreme ideology is marginalised.

The dismantling of Momentum and the rejection of Johnson and Truss suggest to me that mainstream centrist politics that focus on steady growth and stability in Government have and will prevail in the UK. This is not what we see happening in Europe or America and we are the better for it.

Proud of what we have become

Of course there is much in Britain today which is wretched. I have seen the state of the NHS over the weekend and what I have seen is far from good. I walk from my house to the station in Windsor past beggars, cycle from Blackfriars to Bank past a tented village of homeless people living on Upper Thames Street. Even in the most privilidged parts of our society the signs of destitution are apparent. As Bell points out, the Churches where he lives spend their weekdays as food-banks.

Sharon Graham of Unite is right to say that people cannot wait to see the end of deprivation. The Labour Government is right to say that it cannot change things overnight and there is a tension here which will not be easy for Starmer and his cabinet to manage.

But I sense that there is now an opportunity for us to answer the “Great Britain- question”. We need to take a look at the country we have become and “make it mightier yet”.  We do not need to roll the clock back to a world of Gibson jigsaws or even “Cool Britannia”. We are not in Rewind.