Will Hutton’s got a brilliant article in this week’s Observer,

For 30 years the financial system in Britain and America has been the battering ram for the free market revolution. The theory has been that markets are so efficient that regulation and state intervention must be as minimal as possible – allowing a very particular conception of finance, exemplified by hedge funds and private equity, to become the most dominant influence in our economies. Now the theory and its practice have exploded.

It has been that government and business alike have been in thrall to hegemonic deregulated financial markets and their sole interest – to maximise immediate short term profits.

Every chief executive I have spoken to over the last few years has had mounting concern that the financial markets and uncommitted shareholders do not value what business values: research, innovation, motivated people, brand, loyalty, trust, independence. What the markets value instead is the takeover, so many of which go wrong. There is equal concern about how extravagant City pay has become a benchmark for corporate salaries, crippling internal norms of fairness. Nor they do agree with the City ideology that the state necessarily bungles everything because it is the state, while free markets never make mistakes. Serious chief executives know how crucial the state is to fund research, education, skills and the national infrastructure – and that it can be adaptive and intelligent.

But for the change to happen there has to be political leadership. For decades progressive politics has been hobbled by a ball and chain around its feet. Now it can break free. The ideology and practice of the City can be challenged and reformed, and policies that enhance genuine and fair wealth generation be championed. The floundering government has a heaven-sent opportunity: if Brown and Darling have the imagination and chutzpah to seize it. If they don’t, they should stand aside for those who will. This case needs to be made in office, not in opposition.

Thus the new agenda. Today’s City is as over-powerful as trade unions were in the Seventies. Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems could lead, but have got lost. Cameron’s Conservatives are the City’s ally. Only pusillanimity and dither stand between Labour and seizing an extraordinary political chance.

Does Brown still have sufficient flexibility to take this route? It would please me if he did and it would, at least partially, redeem him in my mind as a public figure.