Speaking of responsible capitalism and ‘predistribution’ to ease the squeeze on the middle and reduce the cost of living has sometimes seemed appealing slogans in search of robust policy to make them real. As the general election draws nearer the premium on such policy will sharpen for Labour, making Patrick Diamond’s Transforming the Market: Towards a new political economy likely to be an increasingly valuable resource.

If there were to be a ‘department for Milibandism’, as the proposal of a recent, widely debated Jeremy Cliffe piece for the Economist has been summarised, then Diamond’s book would be a strategy for it. It even advocates a new department a bit like that proposed by Cliffe – ‘an economic “super-ministry” at the heart of Whitehall combining the department of business, innovation and skills (BIS), the department of communities and local government (DCLG) and core Treasury functions’.

However, while the department envisaged by Cliffe seems a concentration of power – ‘it might take responsibility for job centres and active labour market policies from the department of work and pensions, post-16 education and training from the department for education, and cities and local growth from the department for communities and local government’ – Diamond’s ‘super-ministry’ would bring power together to give it away, having ‘a specific remit to decentralise and devolve economic power away from central government’.

Diamond advocates dispersing key public institutions outside of London – the House of Lords, for example, in the regions – and giving local authorities more discretionary powers. But it’s debateable whether he offers enough to resolve the UK’s Catch-22 of being a heavily centralised state without regional power units capable of exercising increased responsibility with efficacy.

In the absence of such units, when the Davies commission tells Birmingham that it will have no additional aviation capacity this side of 2030, it is the business secretary, Vince Cable, that must bring querying this recommendation to national prominence. Yet expansion of regional airports is part of Diamond’s strategy for rebalancing away from London. The national conversation about HS2 is also London-centric, as if, for example, more than halving the journey time between Birmingham and Leeds is inconsequential.

The Independent has reported that Joe Anderson, elected mayor of Liverpool, ‘is a charismatic, larger-than-life leader (and) is he becoming a … national figure’. He is the exception in England outside London, which, buttressed between the imposing Boris Johnson and Alex Salmond, lacks national clout. Without somehow cultivating regional institutions and leaders with this, the Catch-22 will remain unresolved and the regional airports unexpanded.

Diamond wants to boost the role of academy schools in disadvantaged areas. This seems vintage New Labour. But it’s significant that someone so associated with that tradition now puts transforming the market front and central. He knows that this transformation requires the transformation of the state. For this to be best achieved, Labour will need, though, to return to government with a plan for cracking the Catch-22 and, in some shape or form, more Joe Andersons.

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Jonathan Todd is a Progress contributing editor and deputy editor of Labour Uncut

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Transforming the Market: Towards a new political economy

Patrick Diamond

Civitas | 106pp

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Photo: Ed Thomas