“The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy—not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.”

“But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners.”

“We have to abandon the conceit that isolated personal actions are going to solve this crisis. Our policies have to shift.”

“Human mental identities are not like shoes, of which we can only wear one pair at a time. We are all multi-dimensional beings. Whether a Mr. Patel in London will think of himself primarily as an Indian, a British citizen, a Hindu, a Gujarati-speaker, an ex-colonist from Kenya, a member of a specific caste or kin-group, or in some other capacity depends on whether he faces an immigration officer, a Pakistani, a Sikh or Moslem, a Bengali-speaker, and so on. There is no single platonic essence of Patel. He is all these and more at the same time.”

“Economists whosimply advised leaving the economy alone, governments whose firstinstincts, apart from protecting the gold standard by deflationary policies,was to stick to financial orthodoxy, balance budgets and cut costs, werevisibly not making the situation better. Indeed, as the depression continued,it was argued with considerable force not least by J.M. Keynes whoconsequently became the most influential economist of the next fortyyears - that they were making the depression worse. Those of us wholived through the years of the Great Slump still find it almost impossibleto understand how the orthodoxies of the pure free market, then soobviously discredited, once again came to preside over a global period ofdepression in the late 1980s and 1990s, which, once again, they wereequally unable to understand or to deal with. Still, this strange phenomenonshould remind us of the major characteristic of history which itexemplifies: the incredible shortness of memory of both the theorists andpractitioners of economics. It also provides a vivid illustration of society'sneed for historians, who are the professional remembrancers of what theirfellow-citizens wish to forget.”

“Now listen to the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s. These were developed by the people who went on to become part of the Fascist experience:(1) shift power directly to economic and social interest groups;(2) push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies;(3) obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest -- that is, challenge the idea of the public interest.This sounds like the official program of most contemporary Western governments.”

“Many years later, another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the twenty-first century must be left to answer.”