Niall Christie assesses a new book which seeks to offer helpful and progressive suggestions to the UK government (Britain Needs Change: The politics of hope and Labour's challenge, Politicos, November 2024)
Finding my way through Britain Needs Change was less an exercise in hope, but an attempt to navigate reminders of the constant fumbles and mismanagement of the British state. A necessary and inevitable task, I suppose, in a text seeking to outline the various challenges we all face post-Tory government.
Registering the problems, fumbles, and mismanagements remains a struggle - possibly underlined by the content of the essays that make up this volume (edited by Scottish authors Gerry Hassan and Simon Barrow) - and this shows just how serious and all-encompassing the predicament we find ourselves in is.
But weaved through Britain Needs Change is a hopefulness (not shared by the reviewer in this case), that a better Britain is possible, if only the right steps are taken to correct our course.
To be commended is the candour and seriousness with which the question of public investment is tackled. Mariana Mazzucato successfully underlines the importance of what she calls “patient public finance” in building an industrial policy - something sorely lacking in the plans of governments both in Holyrood and Westminster.
Describing goals and missions that could be taken on board - a phrase familiar to the Prime Minister and a set of “pledges” which he would be do to focus on - the book sets out the possibility of reframing our priorities to fit our flailing public services, while also aligning with critical threats such as the climate crisis: this shows a coherence of political thought. A lesson, maybe, for the elected politicians who pick up Britain Needs Change.
I would have liked to have seen a few more concrete policy proposals. While not necessary to building hope within Britain, and particularly in Scotland, the grinding down of public trust over the past few decades has already taken its toll on public tolerance for vacuous pronouncements and the development of Westminster as a talking shop. If this hope is to carry over to the electorate, the way in which changes are actually going to come needs to be explained in terms which are concrete and explicit, not made up of slogans as has been consistently the choice of leaders.
Sue Goss captures this discontent well in her essay, Can the UK’s Broken Political System and Culture Be Remade?, and her piece is also useful in highlighting opportunities offered to Starmer and his Labour top team. But for me, the book's conclusion is too kind to a Prime Minister who has shifted multiple times between pledges, milestones and first steps, tripping over himself in an attempt to be seen as a “mission-driven” leader, but instead offering more of the same prattling politics which fundamentally fails to challenge the status quo - never mind deliver change.
Early in the book, the question is posed, ‘What chance for Labour resetting the agenda?’
Not to be completely devoid of hope, given the subject matter, but I’d say 'slim to none'.
But the seeming inevitability of Labour’s failure to live up to the challenges laid out in Britain Needs Change does not undermine the importance of the subject matter and the authority with which these problems - facing both Scotland and the rest of this island - are outlined.
Frankly, if the governments of the day were to utilise even a smidge of the critical thinking on show in Hassan and Barrow's collection of pieces, we’d all be much better off.
Published 13 January 2025