Wealth & Money Quote by Patricia Hewitt

The sentence is pure managerial politics: a call to action that never quite names the thing demanding action. Hewitt’s “that” is doing heavy lifting, a placeholder that signals urgency while keeping the speaker insulated from specifics. It’s the language of a party trying to look serious in real time - responsive, pragmatic, modern - without getting pinned down on which interests will lose when policy finally arrives.

Her repetition of “modern” isn’t decorative; it’s a political shibboleth. In the late-1990s/early-2000s British centre-left universe Hewitt helped shape, “modern economy and society” meant globalised markets, flexible labour, financialisation, and the cultural pluralism that made older class-based rhetoric feel blunt. “Thinking through the role of a left party” frames ideology as an adaptive exercise, almost a consultancy brief. The subtext: the left can’t just be about redistribution or organised labour anymore; it has to justify itself inside the rules of the new economic order - or at least appear fluent in them.

“Policy response” lands as the punchline, because it’s both promise and alibi. Promise: we will govern, not merely protest. Alibi: we are technocratic problem-solvers, so don’t accuse us of betraying principles; we’re “responding” to conditions. The intent is to reposition the left as competent custodians of change, even when that change was produced by forces the left once claimed to oppose. It’s a sentence built to reassure swing voters, calm markets, and gently discipline the party’s own base - a modernising creed in the bland, efficient dialect of New Labour-era power.