That’s the Kirkcudbright Fringe, by the way, where Will Hutton was promoting his new book, This Time No Mistakes, “a blueprint for a better future if the Labour Party takes it seriously.”[1]
Well obviously, this was an important event, though I’d have to admit that, for pure Fringe entertainment, Guardian columnist, John Crace, was a greater pleasure and electoral commentator, Professor John Curtis, a joy. The latter is someone who plainly revels in being let off the leash of his more restrained television persona. For facts and figures presented with animated clarity, insight and humour, and occasional disparaging asides, he is an unbeatable political commentator. His framing of a possible future Scottish independence referendum was not one I had previously heard: a choice between one union, in which Scotland is currently a very significant if somewhat discontented fraction, and another, in which Scotland would be a very small part. However, fresh from addressing a group of Tory MPs, to explain to them exactly why they had got things so terribly wrong, Curtis was masterfully unbiased. Will Hutton on the other hand is an undisguised supporter of the Labour Party and so I was keen to hear the detail of his “blueprint.”
Keir Starmer has called This Time No Mistakes, “a brilliant book…an intellectual, historical, political read with some strong themes … read it if you haven’t already. For me that endorsement starts very encouragingly and then falters a little. Will Hutton however was happy to tell us that he had recently been to watch the Arsenal with Sir Keir. They both support The Gunners and Will Hutton is obviously hopeful that his “blueprint” has wormed its way into the mind of the Labour bigwigs, despite what may be thought of as the contrary evidence of the winter fuel payments debacle and Sir Keir’s opening pitch to the electorate, “Things will get worse before they get better” which sounds upsettingly like a repeat of George Osborne’s austerity.
So, what is it that Will Hutton is on about? He is concerned, I think rightly, by the slide of the modern world towards unbridled individualism and wishes to promote instead, the “we” society. Being in Scotland, I was initially thrown by this objective, hearing “wee” – as in small – rather than “we” as in collective, but having corrected that misstep, things started to make more sense. To properly report, I’ll need to read the book but here’s a few tasters gleaned from his Kirkcudbright Fringe appearance, supported by a little preliminary reading of the text and a recent Hutton Observer article with the very encouraging title, Labour needs billions to fund its plans – and I know where it can be found.[2]
The Observer article offers quite a technical treatise, the essentials of which, Hutton assures us, are cited in the Labour manifesto. There are, he says, “1.4tn funds fossilised in Britain’s 5,100 defined benefit pension fund schemes.” On the basis of a cursory inspection, the manifesto seems a little less explicit on this point but does say: “Labour will also act to increase investment from pension funds in UK markets.” Now, that is a very appealing idea but not one which has, as yet, been loudly enough proclaimed. Indeed, as I walked out of the event I fell in with a couple, one of whom was clutching a signed copy of No Mistakes whilst complaining about Will Hutton’s uncritical endorsement of Sir Keir. “Our economy,” she said, “is not like a household budget.” I think I can detect the influence of Yanis Varoufakis in this observation.[3] She carried on: “Why can‘t we just print money like they did in the pandemic?”
Why indeed! I tried to “explain” that inflationary pressures, the policies of the Bank of England and the fear of a Truss like run on the pound may have something to do with this reluctance towards quatitative easing, but I could see my flounderings weren’t cutting much ice with my interlocuter, but the little I have gleaned from No Mistakes makes clear that the journey of the UK in the last 50 years has severely weakened the resilience of our economy to rebound from setbacks by means of such devices. Will Hutton listed five “catastrophes” which define the UK’s decline in the modern era:
- Deindustrialisation under the government of Margaret Thatcher
- The financial crisis of Black Wednesday under Norman Lamont’s chancellorship in 1992
- The financial crash of 2007 to 2008 (under a Labour government which had failed to adequately regulate the financial sector)
- Brexit in 2016
- The disaster of Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget during the ill-fated premiership of Liz Truss in 2022.
In pondering this list, it occurred to me that Will Hutton had made no mention of the shortcomings of our electoral system. At the question stage of the event, I managed to grab the attention of the man with the roving mic and pointed out that a proportional system might have avoided at least three of these “catastrophes” – Thatcher, Brexit and Truss, would not have happened and I was pretty certain that neither would the other two “catastrophes”. So why didn’t the topic of electoral reform figure in his remarks?
Will Hutton fielded this challenge with ease, assuring us that he has positive things to say about electoral reform in his book and, indeed, developed my counterfactual by pointing out that if there had been PR in the 1920s then, instead of a national government led by Ramsay MacDonald, wedded to the Gold Standard, we might have had a coalition led by that old goat Lloyd George and advised by John Maynard Keynes, delivering a New Deal for the UK before the idea ever got off the ground in the US. When I search the text of No Mistakes I find a number of favourable references to electoral reform including mention of the British Social Attitudes Survey in 2022 which found “a 51% majority in favour of electoral reform – witness to the growing recognition that the current system does not fairly represent the views of the electorate and encourages a politics that doesn’t work for the majority.”
Proportional Representation is not, in itself, a solution to our problems, but could be a possible means by which consensus may be established, to plot a way forward, though, where the greatest challenge of our age is concerned, climate change, I find it hard to see any practical way forward other than, through fairer representation, giving political expression to the environmental consensus which already exists in the spectrum of opinion running leftwards from the centre.
In the meantime, we are stuck with the present electoral system for the UK Parliament and no hint from Keir Starmer that he is paying attention to either his own party membership or the advice of Will Hutton on the matter. If you share my gloom on this and feel the possibility of electoral reform is a remote one, then I strongly advise you, by way of an antidote, to listen to the recent interview Leading episode titled How to fight fake news and strengthen democracyv Rory and Alistair interview Audrey Tang, former Taiwanese Minister of Digital Affairs. Tang, who has identified as “post-gender” and accepts “whatever pronoun people want to describe me with online,”[4] tells her extraordinary personal story but also documents the remarkable impact of her ideas and policies which have, amongst other things, overturned the endemic distrust of the Taiwanese people in their politicians such that they are now viewed with widespread positivity. Don’t expect the charisma of Sir John Curtis, the wit of John Crace or the policy heft of Will Hutton, but truly, you will not regret listening to this podcast. In the meantime, I must get back to my copy of This Time No Mistakes.
Endnotes and References
1] This bold statement was on the publicity blurb on the bookmark which I received in lieu of a signed copy of the book at the conclusion of the event. The book mark also carried Starmer’s endorsement.
2] Observer article: Labour needs billions to fund its plans – and I know where it can be found.
3] Yanis Varoufakis on Question Time responding to a question from an audience member who comparest the UK economy to his household budget.
4] How to Fight Fake News and Strengthen Democracy Interview with Audrey Tang on the Leading podcast with Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell.
Carruchan 
The Open Book!
A Day Out at Wigtown Book Festival 2024, with a Spotlight on New Authors, Regenerative Agriculture and Artificial Intelligence
Together with John Atkinson and Glen Stanfield, I was a guest at the Spotlight on New Authors, hosted by Open Book, as part of the Wigtown Book Festival 2024. It was a small event, the venue by no means overwhelmed, but the readings, ten minutes each, and the subsequent discussion, made for a very enjoyable hour. Contributory to this was the mix of genres, John, a poet, a lover of Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas; and Glen, a writer of crime fiction, his hero, or greatest influence perhaps, Terry Pratchett and not — as I hinted in my question to him later, Lee Child, who he doesn’t really like. Then there was my own offering, an extract from my memoir, Remembered Fragments, recalling a night out with a gang of Irish navvies to celebrate the end of my short spell labouring on the construction of a link from the M4 to the town of Reading. Much drink was taken. “When a mug full of vodka was handed to me, I realised the evening had just begun.”
John will shortly publish a book of poems with Drunk Muse Press, edited by Hugh McMillan. Glen is on his fifth novel and obviously has a loyal fan base. The discussion at the conclusion of the readings, which could easily have fallen flat, somehow took off and became diverse and interesting. Everything from Obliquity — the title of one of John’s poems, concerning the tilt of the earth, so vital to our seasonal variations — to desperate stories of human trafficking, the raw material for Glen’s most recent book, Out of Darkness. And then there was my own turn to field questions; “What would my next book be?” A reflection, perhaps, — I extemporised — on the divisive character of our education system: how it works so well for some but is an unfulfilling trial for others. I argued that these distinct experiences have marked us all deeply and fed the political polarisation which is abroad in our culture. As Glen put it succinctly at the conclusion of my ramblings: “One size does not fit all.”
I thank the organisers of the Wigtown Book Festival for providing this opportunity for locally based writers and the two ladies from the United States, airbnb proprietors of Open Book for just a week, for being such welcoming hosts.
While the event itself was a rewarding experience, my attempts to gain visibility for my book in local bookshops were less successful. I tried several and explained that I had been a participant in the Spotlight event. Would they be willing to take a few copies of my book on a sale-or-return basis? The answer in each case was a polite refusal. I am aware that new writing is a very mixed bag, not in general a great commercial proposition and much of it will be forgotten before the year is out. But surely the organisers of the Festival could organise some bookshop space for the display and, who knows, even the sale of the work of our local aspirant writers. At the very least those featured in the Spotlight event deserve this opportunity.
To be fair, my investigation into the matter did generate a number of sympathetic conversations, and I was not so cast down by my refusals as to be unable to enjoy the rest of the day. This, for me, involved first of all, a coffee with Brian, who really ought to be blogging about his former life amongst the Inuit in the Hudson Bay area of Canada; his life long love of nature and the hills of Galloway and Scotland; his expeditions to Nepal to help with the building of a school and his more recent incarnation as a tour guide in the Himalayas, Sri Lanka and other places of which I only dream. He had chosen to defer his walk on the Merrick to hear me read.
And then it was off to the County Buildings to hear Tom Heap being interviewed, intelligently I thought, by Andy Cassell, about his book Landsmart. This champions the idea of regenerative agriculture. Inevitably, the subject of the proposed National Parks came up. “They’re a bit of red herring,” he said. “Unlike US national parks, they are not very good for nature as the land is still in private ownership.” He moved on to wind farms: “They don’t really take up a lot of space, unless you include the visual impact!” He’s clear: we need major investment in the electricity grid and will just have to accept more pylons. He thought the money spent by the Tory Government on HS2 was squandered and should have been invested in our renewable infrastructure. As he signed my copy of his book I asked him about George Monbiot’s Regenesis, a more full on challenge to agriculture and, indeed, a challenge to our entire culture. “I’m not a polemicist,” said Tom Heap. “I’m a pragmatist.” He paused to return my copy of his book and added, wanly: “But he sells more books than me.”
At the same venue, next up was Nigel Toon, to talk about his book How AI Thinks. His presentation, to a full house, was distinguished by both humour and clarity. There is a choice, he suggested: “Are we going to make eight billionaires richer or are we going to make eight billion people richer?…We are the humans in charge of this stuff!” At question time, someone asked him when AI would make it possible to have a conversation with dolphins — apparently AI is helping to decode the communication which takes place between female dolphins and their calves. Nigel smiled and opined that dolphins would probably not have much interest in communication with us. But then he dropped in a statistic that might have pleased George Monbiot. “90% of all biology on earth is driven by us. Only 10% are dolphins.” It was a slightly cryptic observation in which I think, the 10% of dolphins stands for all the surviving species left living wild while the other 90% represents the species displacement which has taken place in order to feed us all a meat based diet.
Both events were brilliant, by the way, but daunting. I just don’t know when I’m going to find the time to read all these books that I have bought.
Notes and References