Radical incrementalism

Whatever you may know, think or understand of and about Torsten Bell and his and colleagues work at the Resolution Foundation (and certainly his previous involvement, dealings and work pretty directly in and around UK government), the quoted passage below, from his book (published June 2024), Great Britain?, is a pretty clear and good stab at adding productively and constructively to the ongoing conversations about the state of Britain and its many issues and the honesty and directness that is politically required to incrementally get on with sorting the self-made mess out.

As the book says and implies (albeit saying some things and then pretty much saying later the opposite), those many issues and problems are quite obvious and relatively simple to see and even steadily fix, considering. We just need to collectively own responsibility and involve people (to empower all for a better future) on the bread-and-butter issues, the small stuff, the typically non-headline grabbing but actually important stuff.

Build those attitudes, approaches and foundations and a lot of the higher-up crap, opportunism, competitiveness and endless administration and managerialism that many seem to play and do will start to recede and get shown to be actually part of the problem, so its absence is actually integral to real, meaningful progress.

By doing so, especially incrementally and regularly as espoused in the book, certainly in and around politics so that electoral cycles become much shorter, policy and regulations become clearer and very much fewer in number but certainly more relevant and enforceable and, regional centres and even local councils get better and more effective powers to involve and enable their communities, currently separate from a central bubble that really, doesn't have a progressive bone in its metaphorical body but could actually be effective if it did less and did it better and by empowering, through devolvement, UK regions and national governing bodies, including England, like it certainly has with Wales and Scotland.

Standing in the way of progress are mistakes that are as much cultural as economic: the wrong kinds of patriotism or radicalism. Confusing nostalgia with patriotism leaves too many treating Britain’s past, rather than its present, as the guide to our future. This kind of nostalgic patriotism ironically often doesn't much like the Britain it claims to be patriotic about, seeing the country as too woke, too multicultural, too educated. It wishes we were a manufacturing nation rather than celebrating that the UK is the second-biggest service exporter in the world. Far from keeping Britain as it is, this type of patriotism is taking us backwards. It hinders our ability to bind ourselves together and lacks a vision of the better country that people of all ages, classes and races can help build.

Just as dangerous is believing that everything about Britain is broken, ignoring our strengths and claiming that only ripping everything up and starting again can turn things around. This isn’t radical. It’s nihilistic, resulting in claims that big constitutional changes will magic away our economic problems. Brexit, whatever you think of it, hasn’t done that. This belief sees the left dreaming of turning us into Germany, rather than doing the hard work of turning us into a better Britain. And it leaves the right – most obviously Liz Truss – recklessly announcing huge tax cuts, without any engagement with why taxes have been rising under a Conservative government.

What Britain needs instead is a new patriotism, rooted in an understanding of our present and an ambition for our future, not just pride in our past. This approach is genuinely patriotic: it does not ignore the real problems the country faces, but is confident that a better version of Britain, not an imaginary one, is desirable and achievable. Its method is one of radical incrementalism – radical to reflect how far the status quo is failing us, and incremental because lasting change is achieved by improving reality as we find it, not by wishful thinking.

In a time when people’s trust in a better future is dimmed, we need a political and economic project that offers hard-headed – believable – hope. At the core of this book is the bread and butter of economics as families experience it, and concrete steps that can be taken to restore faith in the possibility of progress. It is an argument for Britain to start investing in its future rather than living off its past, while fairly sharing the sacrifices that building a brighter future requires as well as the rewards it offers.

The Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf worries that ‘the UK has become accustomed to managing stagnation’ and ‘this frog is being boiled too slowly’ for politicians to do what is required.²⁶ I am more optimistic, precisely because so many of us now recognise the hole Britain is in. It’s a damning indictment of where we are, but also the basis for a coalition for comfort zones, to get growth up and inequality down. If that doesn’t happen, we aren’t just risking our economy, but the health of our society.

Torsten Bell Great Britain?

UK politics needs radical incrementalism alongside significant changes structurally to an outdated and crumbling parliamentary status quo that blocks and covers some quite insightful, progressive and thoughtful ideas and people that do want and seek real change but have to work in an aged system that seems more trapped by its heritage and traditions than the last cream tea in a café that’s next to a decrepit and pointlessly ‘operating’ stately home that just exists in nostalgia, but has free parking if you’re a member (but maybe not at those prices).

Even though they probably wouldn’t want to – despite what they know and have done and achieved for others! – get people like Hilary Cottam, Gina Miller, Gillian Tett, Sarah Jaffe, Michelle Meagher, Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Caroline Lucas, Grace Blakeley, Darren McGarvey, Mustafa Suleyman, Andi Brierley, Gary Stevenson, Jeffrey Boakye, George Monbiot, Torsten Bell, Ed Miliband and even (certainly the ideas, common sense and influence of people like) Mariana Mazzucato, Naomi Klein, David Runciman and Yanis Varoufakis working in (or for) a neater and more efficient set of devolved UK parliaments and, or, governments to inspire and involve all levels and even, slowly but surely, change the flipping (UK) system and take it well away from its quite useless neoliberalism and reform its rotten (capitalist) core.

It’ll take some doing and time but with a plenty of radical incrementalism in and around all the conversations, debates, arguments and progressive and meaningful involvement, good things can happen collectively (and hopefully involve fewer hierarchies, less management and unnecessary administration).