START AGAIN

HOW WE CAN FIX OUR BROKEN POLITICS

PHILIP COLLINS

Fourth Estate, 216pp, £9.99

Philip Collins, a former speechwriter for Tony Blair and now a Times columnist, believes there is nowhere for a self-respecting centrist to call home in our current political system.

Start Again is Collins’s proposed reboot of the system, with the formation of a new centrist party being uppermost in his mind. In the

Times, Lord Willetts welcomed the book as being good ‘on the dangers of statism’ and for wanting ‘to promote voluntarism and localism’. However, he was sceptical about the prospects of a new centrist party that ‘looks awfully like the SDP Mark II’, preferring instead that ‘the core values of liberal democracy are distributed across political parties and do not belong to just one centrist party’. Nonetheless, he hoped that Collins’s ‘excellent ideas are fought over by Labour and the Conservatives’.

New Statesman special correspondent Stephen Bush, in his review for the Guardian, found that Collins ‘dips into one of the more dubious literary traditions – that of the mid-career politician’s book: written not at the end of a political journey but at the start; a way to improve the profile of a middleranking minister or the senator of an obscure state to facilitate their bid for a bigger job’. It is ‘halfway between memoir and manifesto’ and ‘there are few examples of the genre that manage to lift themselves beyond the lamentable: Start Again, regrettably, isn’t one of them’. Several of Collins’s proposed solutions, such as increasing inheritance tax, having an elected second chamber, and giving the vote to anyone over the age of 16, are already Labour Party policy. ‘The tragedy is that the question of what the “politically homeless” should do deserves a deeper and more thoughtful analysis than it receives here. Start Again? I wish he had.’