Leadership Quote by Chris Patten

Patten’s line is a politician’s sleight of hand masquerading as plain talk: he takes a loaded word, “unbridled,” and refuses to let it do the ideological work his opponents want. In one move he concedes a moral intuition - that capitalism can run wild - while tightening the definition until it becomes almost banal: unbridled equals unregulated. Who, in a functioning state, is going to argue for literally no rules? The sentence is a preemptive deflation device, designed to make radical laissez-faire sound unserious without sounding anti-market.

The intent is triangulation. Patten signals comfort with capitalism’s engine while positioning regulation as the responsible steering wheel, not a brake. The phrasing “if by ‘unbridled’ you mean…” is courtroom language, a controlled cross-examination of the audience’s vocabulary. He’s not debating policy yet; he’s policing terms, because he knows the fight is often won at the level of adjectives.

The subtext is equally pointed: there are people (usually on the right) who romanticize “unbridled capitalism,” and there are people (usually on the left) who use the phrase to imply exploitation and chaos. Patten declines both dramas. He’s carving out the centrist claim that markets need rules to be legitimate, and that regulation is not an apology for capitalism but its condition of survival.

In context - a late-20th-century conservative-modernizer landscape shaped by Thatcherism’s aftermath, financial deregulation debates, and growing inequality anxieties - this reads as an attempt to launder pragmatism into principle. It’s not fiery rhetoric; it’s governance rhetoric, built to sound inevitable.