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The Tory era is not (quite) over yet, but already the obituaries are in. In particular, two new books from Torsten Bell and Paul Collier seek to bury not just Rishi Sunak and his cabinet but the whole economic approach that the Conservatives have taken since 2010, or perhaps even 1979.
Let’s start with Bell – until very recently head of the Resolution Foundation thinktank, and before that the man who, as Ed Miliband’s policy director, gave us the joy of the EdStone. Great Britain? sets out a comprehensive list of the ways in which we have become a ‘stagnation nation’: low investment, high inequality, insufficient house building, stingy benefits, low-paid labour and so on.
This has become a country, Bell argues, where how you do in life depends on having good parents or a good marriage – in effect, a return to the social realities of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. In particular, we have diverged from the growth patterns of our richer neighbours: ‘More than 60 per cent of Brits are at least 15 per cent poorer than their German counterparts’, to give just one of the many statistics he quotes. His book, he says, is ‘an argument for Britain to start investing in its future rather than living off its past’.
Yet there is more reason to pay attention to Bell’s writing than the force of his arguments. At one point he says: ‘There is a real possibility that on their current course the Conservatives may bring their own hegemony to a close.’ In the months since he wrote that, the possibility has hardened into certainty. And what will replace them? The answer is: Torsten Bell. Already rated by the New Statesman as one of the ten most important people on the British left, the think tank boss has now been handed the parliamentary seat of Swansea West, from where he will shape Britain’s economic policy for years.
In a way this shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. There are already many passages in Great Britain? that read like a Keir Starmer speech, not least whenever Bell starts outlining his vision of ‘change that is both radically incremental and grounded in a new patriotism about the country Britain can be’ (and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom).
I should have disliked this book, given that I run a thinktank on the other side of the aisle – the kind the author scorns as clinging to ‘the ideological remnants’ of Thatcherism. And there are all sorts of holes I could pick. The chapter on work and pay barely mentions mass migration. There is little on the burden of regulation or the significance of the private sector.
But in truth Bellmakes a pretty decent case. He is strong on all manner of economic problems, not least what he describes as our ‘housing omnishambles’, which has resulted in more young adults living with their parents than renting or owning. And he is honest enough to dismiss fashionable nostrums on both right and left: he writes off anti-wokery as irrelevant nostalgia, but is equally dismissive of the left’s cherished Universal Basic Income, or rejoining the EU as an economic panacea, or the drive to net zero creating millions of green jobs.
Yet if I were a left-wing firebrand, I’d emerge from this book even more worried about the direction in which Starmer wants to take us. There’s plenty here for free-marketeers to dislike, but not much beyond the author’s ideas for wealth taxes that would get them apocalyptically furious – let alone lead to the kind of protests that saw Bell and Alistair Darling chased by naked pensioners at one particularly memorable Labour conference. It’s all just kind of… moderate.
No, if you want apocalyptic fury, it’s Paul Collier’s Left Behind that you should turn to. This book has two purposes. First, to distil a lifetime of insights from Collier, a leading development economist, about ‘places that once felt prosperous but now have fallen behind’, and his recipes for fixing them. And second, to argue that HM Treasury are an absolute bunch of idiots.
The result is a book that is angrier, spikier and weirder than Bell’s, but all the more lively for it. Collier’s central thesis is that letting the market try to fix things doesn’t work when it comes to left-behind places. Britain, he argues, is the western country where the life chances of rich and poor owe most to circumstances of birth – because our state machinery has both been uniquely laissez-faire (thanks to Maggie and chums) and uniquely top-down, hoarding power and money in Whitehall and starving deindustrialising regions of resources, independence and initiative.
Across the course of the book, Collier looks at countries and areas that have gone from poverty to prosperity, and in some cases back again – from Singapore to Siberia, Bangladesh to Botswana, Rwanda to the Rotary Club. He argues that the most successful generally ignore western economists; that nation-building and institution-building are as important as free markets; and even that the whole democracy thing can be thoroughly overrated.
Again, as a free-marketeer, there’s lots here I’d take issue with. I’m not sure, as Collier claims, that the publication of new evidence on longevity in the UK was a news-media thunderbolt on the scale of riots across France, or the collapse of the Dutch government. But on the central charge of overcentralisation, he’s absolutely right. Whitehall has asserted a staggering degree of control over our economic life, and it’s hard to argue that we’re better off for it. And the Tories’ plan to fix it via the Levelling Up agenda – on which Collier was an official adviser – was, he argues, strangled in its cradle by No. 11.
Unless the Treasury is tamed, Collier insists, there can be no solving Britain’s fundamental problems. Will it ever be done? Over to you, Torsten.
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