How to revive Britain after the Tories and Brexit have battered it into the ground

The Lowdown interview with Will Hutton

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Greetings, and I hope you are having a good weekend. This week’s Lowdon interview is with one of the UK’s most consistently interesting centre-left thinkers, Will Hutton, whose new book This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain is just out.

Will has an unfashionable but, in my view, justified optimism about the next Labour government.

To take one example, Hutton is inspired by the anti-poverty programme for working age adults of Angela Rayner. Like so many interesting ideas, it gets barely no media coverage– most journalism being produced by and for the middle classes .

This is a shame because 60 per cent of the working age population are not middle class by any reasonable standard. They do not have stable, tenured employment that comes with sickness pay and holiday leave. Then at the bottom there are more than two million workers, who have no contract of employment whatsoever.

Labour thinks that workers should not be sackable at will and should have holiday entitlement and sickness pay.  It’s a strong answer to infantile leftists who say that Labour is just Tory Light. But it is also part of a wider programme that could begin to rebuild the country.

Please listen to the whole thing via the links above.

Underlying Hutton’s optimism is a faith in Keir Starmer. The more one learns about him, the more extraordinary Starmer seems, not least because his public persona is one of reassuring ordinariness.

Below is a long read on Starmer from me, which I enjoyed writing. There’s a paywall, but if you sign up you have access to all articles, podcasts and archives, and you allow me to carry on working. (Substack also offer a free trial for readers of a nervous disposition.)

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Keir Starmer: the nicest ruthless bastard you could hope to meet

Keir Starmer is not boring.  Voters may say he is. His careful language and habitual expression of a faintly startled wombat may confirm their impression. He gives every appearance of being a dull, responsible figure an exhausted Britain is turning to after the spasms of Corbyn, Johnson and Truss.

The UK is in the final scene of the Lord of the Flies. Delinquent children have burned the place down, and Starmer is the leader of a rescue party come to save us from ourselves.

Yet there is nothing remotely tedious about Keir Starmer. He has the potential to be one of the most extraordinary figures in modern British history.