Summer reading list from our Chief Exec

This year’s busman’s holiday reading list goes deep into the summer’s wonkiest sub-genre, the “What’s wrong with Britain and how to fix it?” manifesto, including:

The Only Way is Up by Polly Toynbee and David Walker

This Time No Mistakes by Will Hutton

Great Britain? How We Get Our Future Back by Torsten Bell

Failed State by Sam Freedman

Toynbee, Walker and Hutton are heavyweight veterans of the left. Bell is a former Labour policy head, former Chief Exec of the Resolution Foundation and newly elected Labour MP. Freedman, a former adviser to the Coalition Government, is now an influential commentator and analyst at the IFG and on his popular Substack.

The timing of these books, published as a new Labour administration comes to power, is not a coincidence. All are intended to be read as, ‘here’s what the last lot got wrong, and here’s what you should do instead.’

We’ll publish a full review in September but based on a rapid, possibly unjust scan of indexes (though Freedman, oddly, doesn’t have one), I suspect that local government does not figure as prominently as I think it should. Or at least that while the damage done to local government is part of the indictment of what’s gone wrong, councils are not sufficiently centered as part of the solution.

In LGIU’s Manifesto for the Future of Local Government, we argue that you can’t successfully pursue a mission of national renewal unless you support and enable local government to help you do so. I’m looking forward to seeing how far that argument is reflected in these contributions to our national discourse.

Of course, there should also be a chance over summer to enjoy some good fiction as well. Here are the ones on my list:

Hungry for What by María Bastarós

Murder in a Heatwave by Cecily Gayford

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch