The world is in flux. Last week, we witnessed the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president by our biggest ally, a threat to annex Greenland by the same, and the UK promising troops to defend a future ceasefire in Ukraine. Every week we hear of the onward march of AI, which could displace thousands of jobs and have profound implications for every aspect of our lives. At the same time, too many of our political institutions and large parts of our political culture seem too archaic to cope.
Progressives have a choice: either sit back and let Donald Trump and nationalist populists shape a new paradigm on their terms, or get our act together and come up with a set of bigger, better and bolder ideas. We can deny change and continue with the old ways of doing things, in the hope that something will turn up to save the day. Or we can respond to the need for a new agenda and describe what a progressive version of that change should look like.
That is the choice we are laying out this week with the launch of HopeWorks, an online platform for engaging with ideas and arguments for a different, fairer future. This will be a place for robust debate, brought together by some of the major think tanks in Britain today and a host of individuals working on new ideas. It is a non-partisan resource for people to draw on, as we do the difficult work of building that alternative project.
Here in one place, you can engage with the debate provoked by the Growth Trilogy, a series of reports on how we can create a powerful new economy; MP Liam Byrne’s compelling case for addressing wealth inequality; or Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance, which argues for ending the conflict that comes from scarcity by building stuff far more rapidly. The website includes arguments about Britishness, the climate transition, reform of the state and what a progressive vision for technology looks like.
Our starting point is a simple proposition: whatever you wish to achieve in politics, ideas matter. You might think this is stating the obvious. But in the rapid-fire social media age, and in a political culture where short-term tactics dominate, the importance of deeper thought is easy to forget.
Successful political projects win the battle of ideas. These ideas create the space to make long-lasting change, and stand in powerful contrast to the transactional politics that we have got so used to. And political parties that create a culture in which ideas and debate can flourish prove better at sustaining and renewing themselves. Ideas matter because they provide a rationale for policy decisions, a narrative people can understand and a north star for them to follow. If people have bought into a world-view, they will be more forgiving of mistakes and more tolerant of the slow pace of change.
We can see that with Trump today. His supporters will accept a lot of Trump’s flip-flopping, idiosyncrasies and chaos because they believe there is a bigger prize at stake – the redrawing of the political and ideological map in order to “Make America great again”.
Mainstream parties may comfort themselves in the belief that the current generation of nationalist populists are only winning across the world because of momentary spasms of a disgruntled electorate. But it just isn’t true. The populists are dominating the battle of ideas. In the US, Project 2025 is a big, comprehensive and compelling piece of work that is now being enacted by Trump in office. The National Conservatives website provides supporters with ideas, polemics and narratives for their followers to deploy on Fox News, social media platforms and the doorstep.
In Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future (2023), the American philosopher Patrick Deneen writes that the problem for liberalism is that the two main pillars of its late 20th-century project have crumbled. The social project – which became caricatured as “woke identity politics” – has become divisive and increasingly seems an electoral dead-end. Its economic project – neoliberal globalisation – has resulted in too many losers. This has left the centre, and especially the centre left, on the intellectual back foot.
In recent years, the centre has been seen too often as a mushy compromise between left and right. People want something more principled and emotionally resonant. There is a danger that progressive governments get labelled as merely technocratic, conceding both values and ideology to the right. You don’t bring a spreadsheet to a fist fight.
Mainstream politics needs people who understand the impulses that led to Brexit, Labour losing Scotland and the Red Wall, and the election of Trump. Alienation with politics and the political process, plus a deep-rooted cost-of-living crisis, makes people want disruption: “Make America great again”, “Take back control”, “Drain the swamp”. Those who occupy the centre ground need to do so with a vigour that offers both realism and hope – and provides a compelling alternative to populist narratives.
The current Labour government is wrestling with the question in an immediate electoral sense: how to see off the rise of Reform. But there is a more important, prior question: how do progressives offer an alternative, compelling prospectus, so that no one needs to hunt on the fringes for glimmers of hope?
This platform is an invitation to readers to offer their own suggestions of the ideas, books, speeches, articles that have inspired you. Or perhaps even to write something where you believe there is a glaring gap. One thing we are certain about, the more we engage in powerful ideas, the more we are likely to shape a fairer future.
[Further reading: Labour has left young women behind]
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