My guest is Will Hutton.

Will Hutton is a British journalist and author.

He currently writes a regular column for The Observer.

He's the president of the Academy of Social Sciences, host the We Society podcast, and is co-chair of the purposeful company.

He's also the author of a new book, this time No Mistakes, How to Remake Britain, which has just been published.

Welcome to the podcast, Will.

Glad to be here. Right. Well, actually, it's exactly four years since our last podcast,

so it's high time that we had a rematch, should we say. The book for which you're the best known,

the state we're in, came out, 1996, if I'm not mistaken, in the run-up to an incoming Labor

Government. This book's coming out now, spring 2024, in the prospect of a quite serious

prospect of a Labour government before the end of the year. Is that how you're positioned the book

to be some kind of, in a sense, an unofficial manifesto for our new Labour government?

In part. In part. I mean, the title, if this time, no mistakes, is kind of addressed it.

Has it got two targets, right, with the title. Target one is that I really want the country to make

a decisive break with market fundamentalist laissez-faire thinking, which was revived

by Mrs Thatcher in 1979, has had been pursued by her imitators, and I think has led to a series

of catastrophic policy errors. Brexit being one of them, austerity being another, excessive natural regulation being another,

and of course monetarism in the 1980s which gutted

so much of British industry in the areas which were gutted,

then voted for Brexit 30 years later,

so that's a target.

The other target is actually the Liberal Left,

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