Written by Peter Holmes & edited by Tanvi Jhunjhunwala
Mar 17, 2025
Radical incrementalism or timid centrism?
Torsten Bell’s work, published in June 2024, focuses on a major British malaise: inequality. Bell, now an elected Member of Parliament, has also chaired the Resolution Foundation, a British think tank centred on addressing problems for those from low socio-economic backgrounds, demarcated as those earning less than £30,000 annually.
Bell’s work opens with a harrowing analysis of the British position: unequal, unprosperous and stagnating.
First, Bell contextualises the British crisis; an array of alarming statistics provides an image of Britain as a stagnant nation in need of radical change. Albeit, I am not sure this change is effectively offered by Bell’s book. Bell seeks to elucidate the extent of British inequality and emphasise its centrality to wider British issues.
The unequal nature of British society is obvious, but Bell effectively illustrates the extent of this inequality—the opening chapter highlights the two-and-a-half times increase of those in destitution from 2017 to 2023. The existence of such inequality, if not egregious enough, is, opines Bell, compounded by interrelation to stagnant growth. Bell’s profession of a ‘stagnation nation’ ascribed to Britain’s history of deindustrialisation and regional discrepancies demonstrates it as a nation trapped in the past.
Such social ills are invariably tied to housing, where the price of housing lies as the second highest in the OECD excluding Finland, yet housing space is now smaller than notorious New York. This fall is continuous: private renters’ space per person is down sixteen percent over the last two decades. A generational divide is displayed here, something that runs throughout the book. Although not a work attacking pensioners, Bell consistently references the discrepancies in social services available to the old compared to the young: emblematic of his addressal of inequality on a regional, generational and material scale. Apropos housing, the one in six baby boomers owning a second home compared to the thirteen percent youth ownership rate in London is striking. Simultaneously, Bell effectively analyses Gordon Brown’s addressal of how pensioner issues and neglect of youth issues laid the path for the twenty-first century post-crash politics.
From Crisis to Reform: Bell’s Roadmap for Change
A dour assessment, yes, but not one of exclusive pessimism. Bell lays out a processual framework of self-proclaimed ‘radical incrementalism’ as a solution. This is one where gradualism and political realism are central, advocating for long-term economic gain rather than short fixes in what portended Starmer’s ‘decade of national renewal’.
In terms of investment, Bell seeks the shift towards an investment nation. Investment here operates not in a distant nostalgia of industrial capacity but rather in Britain’s preexisting service economy. This investment on a national scale needs to be regionalised, at the current rate, it would take Manchester ninety years to reach the same productivity gap with London as Lyon has with Paris.
Such investment would be channelled politically: greater power for local mayors and the delegation of a substantial proportion of income tax to cities rather than the central government, broadly building on international devolution. Investment for Bell isn’t merely governmental. Taking Scandinavian inspiration, Bell seeks greater long-termism in business planning, with workers’ boards to put pressure on sustainable business manoeuvres, a paradigmatic example of his ‘radical’ pragmatism. These investment proposals are surrounding by other progressive policies, both judicial and economic, from the scrapping of the two-child limit to ‘lift half a million children out of poverty overnight’, and the attachment of benefit policy to growth or national income, to the calls for greater workers’ protection and greater union power.
Invariably, such deliverables need funding. For Bell, this comes through ineluctable taxation. In many ways a conformist, rejecting the tenets of degrowth or the more atypical suggestions of David Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs’ theorem, his spending policy is economically sound. Rooted in comparison, as much of his work is, he elucidates the limitations in tax compared to OECD partners, with taxes four and eleven percentage points higher in France and Germany in terms of GDP. Bell proposes the targeting of inefficiencies and loopholes that allow wealthier individuals and corporations to avoid contributing their fair share. For instance, he supports aligning capital gains tax with income tax rates, removing farmland relief, and reforming inheritance tax—pointing out that figures like James Dyson own more land than the British monarch. Bell also calls for higher taxation on second homes, arguing that the current system exacerbates wealth inequality and inflates housing prices. He rejects the cycle of tax cuts followed by emergency reversals, instead arguing for consistency and long-term planning.
Although not converging from mainstream economic principles, in many ways, these proposals read as radical: a reversion of the status quo of a nation that has been stuck in a neoliberal delusion and a call to progressive social reforms. But really, it is mere effective pragmatism. Bell is no ‘de-growther’, no communist, and no usurper of the status quo. Instead, he is a progressive pragmatist. His attitude to housing planning, calling for a genuine implementation of the pre-existing Conservative model, and Universal Credit, calling for fundamental maintenance with small changes to drive working incentives, best depicts this- there is an emphasis on technical reform whilst maintaining the foundations illustrative of his fundamental outlook.
Whilst pragmatic and attractive, is it enough?
Britain, like much of Euro-America, is rife with populist us vs them rhetoric. Trump’s elections and Reform’s overtaking of Labour in voting intention polls provide a sober reminder of the threat that faces our country if effective action is not taken—divisive rhetoric politics.
For a book rooted in economic sensibilities, there is an inherent lack of political practicalities. Bell addresses populism and addresses politics, but the way he does so is rather ineffective. Reading Bell’s work provides an inspiring account as to how to revitalise Britain, but addressing it from a lens of political feasibility, it does not do enough to spell out how to achieve it. A malaise epitomised in Bell’s rise to parliament: his rejection of the two-child benefit cap after his unwavering attack on it in the work, reflective of how the ideals of British parliamentary politics become confined by its rigid reality.
Bell’s claim for a ‘new patriotism’ is great in principle, Britain fostering a movement ‘rooted in an understanding of our present and an ambition for our future, not just pride in our past’. But how does one foster this?
His ‘radical incrementalism’, as outlined, is in many ways quite radical and certainly incrementalist- but how does one sell these policies to a populace craving short-term reward? Such questions are not effectively answered.
Bell ends the work with a proclamation of the need for care about misplaced promises and the need for effective short-term gains to entice the population. Invariably, though, the investment and tax reforms that the work proposes are factors that drive long-term gain. As the ‘populist radical right’ of Reform attempt to replicate American mainstream success, we must excite the viability of employing Bell’s policies and question whether a progressive centrism is enough to ignite an alienated population. Bell addresses the suggestions of many centre-left think tanks on how to address populism: not conforming to populist narrative and addressing issues which the populists thrive on, zero sum inequalities, through a pragmatic lens. However, his work, as with much centre-left politics, fails to address how to answer these questions and be electable. New patriotism and short-term gains are not enough to stifle the divisive zero-sum perceptions of political gain in the United Kingdom. How do you enforce a wealth tax without the Conservatives labelling you as neglecting the elderly? How do you enforce stricter employment laws and company pension increases without libertarians labelling you anti-business?
Addressing populism needs a level of radicalism in policy, and Torsten Bell effectively encapsulates what some of that radicalism should involve. Progressive taxation, devolution, and investment seem undeniably smart ideas and a breath of fresh air in comparison to the tepid approach Labour has taken to governance so far. But as Labour’s cautionary approach has demonstrated, the reality of power politics means that such ideas are often chimeric. Bell is right to focus on inequality and housing as policies in need of major overhaul, but he fails to spell out what is really going to drive this change. Pretty politics, ‘new patriotism’ and the end of zero-sum ideas of political progress to challenge anti-migrant, anti-generational divide are nice in principle, but they omit what is really needed- political confidence. Labour was elected on a sizeable majority, albeit largely due to a flawed political system, yet has failed to make the majority work. Rather than spelling out any form of radical incrementalism, we seem to have a mimesis of Tory false promises, halfway on the environment, halfway on growth, halfway on workers’ rights.
It’s a party afraid of change.
Populism will not be stifled by empty promises nor by good ideas, it will be beaten by effective action. Bell’s work provides a ready and needed insight into how we can make effective change and how we can create an effective centre-left narrative, but it misses out our biggest issue: politicians’ timidity.