How Good We Can Be: Ending the Mercenary Society and Building a Great Country by Will Hutton (Little, Brown, £14.99)
If a book’s worth writing once, it’s worth writing several times. This homely maxim has often proved a recipe for success. Will Hutton is a case in point. Twenty years ago, he had a runaway hit with The State We’re In. He followed that up with The State to Come (1997), then came The World We’re In (2002). As Hutton moved from the editor’s chair at the Observer to the Work Foundation and now to the Principal’s lodge at Hertford College, Oxford, he has stayed heroically on his own message. The title’s tweaked, but the melody lingers on.
The continentals are enlightened, the Anglo-Saxons are deluded. Europe is the future and we would be crazy to stay out of the euro. John Maynard Keynes is good, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are no good. The state is the solution, not the problem. It already showers blessings on us and would shower many more if only we could overcome our misguided suspicions. Government regulation and high taxes are the way to make us happy.
For painting in black and white Kazimir Malevich was a beginner compared to Hutton. There is no hesitation or deviation, although there is quite a bit of repetition, and rather too much of that too-tooism which we old newspaper leader writers lapse into when we’re in a hurry and lack the figures to back up our assertions. In this latest rumbustious jeremiad, How Good We Can Be, we are told three or four times on a single page that “too many” or “too few” people do this or don’t do that.
Hutton begins by telling us that “The State We’re In was that rare thing—a success that came out of nowhere,” and he goes on to quote from or refer to the prescience of his seminal work no less than 27 times by my count. The book was, we are told, the Bible of New Labour, and Tony Blair fell from grace because he failed to stick to the scripture. This is self-congratulation on an operatic scale. Hutton tells us too that he wrote How Good We Can Be in 11 weeks. He might have done better to keep this fact to himself, because the book sometimes reads that way.
He has lost none of his gift for sustained invective. Margaret Thatcher was totally frightful and her “neo-liberal project” has been an unmitigated catastrophe; ditto the “right-wing media,” which have prevented a kinder, more inclusive, less insular country from emerging. Blair gets it in the neck almost as often.
Now, we are told, is the time to make a fresh start under a revived Labour Party with the help of the Greens and the better sort of Liberal Democrat, dedicated to social liberalism and “mass flourishing.” High taxes on almost everything, a press made accountable the way Brian Leveson wants it and new forms of public ownership will set us back on track to the New Jerusalem.
Yet, oddly enough, many of Hutton’s proposals will appeal to a wider audience than social liberals and socialists. In fact, they are pretty much the new consensus: the separation between high street banks and the casino banks; a stiffer stewardship code to deter looting in the boardroom; Treasury guarantees for big construction projects; restoring the insurance base of the welfare state; a return to the old sliding scale for capital gains tax, in order to encourage long-term holding of shares; an end to the tax advantages of debt over equity; reforming council tax and giving local authorities back their financial independence. I warm to all this, and I also like Hutton’s proposals to reinvent the trade unions as co-partners with business, particularly the idea that they might set up mutually-owned service companies to sell their services to employers.
These days we are all in favour of diversifying patterns of ownership beyond the standard plc model, to include more co-operatives and also “public benefit companies,” which guarantee under charter to deliver certain public benefits and enjoy tax advantages in return. Free enterprise used to be more diverse and could be so again. The awkward truth is, though, that these alluring alternatives are no more risk-free than the old limited company. It is an awkward thought that the best-known alternative corporations of this sort over the past few years have been the Co-op, Railtrack/Network Rail and the BBC—none of them exactly without problems of governance.
But it’s Hutton’s grand narrative that seems the more rickety. We are constantly told that the past 20 or 30 years have been a disaster for the United Kingdom. Yet at the same time we are also told that “Britain has more world-class universities per head of population than any other country,” that “The triangle bounded by the M3 in the south M40 to the north and with Heathrow at its centre boasts the highest concentration of high-tech start-ups outside California and Massachusetts,” that the BBC remains the finest broadcasting service in the world, that the National Health Service is “the cheapest system in the world producing the best health results across a range of key indicators” and “on measures of effectiveness, safety, patient-centredness, co-ordination, quality and access, Britain scores number one.”
Yet it is these very organisations that have been subject to incessant reforms over the past generation, so someone must have been doing something right, or at least not too disastrously wrong. Hutton also approves of the new academy schools and the Teach First scheme, but who thought up those? If Britain is so riddled with despair and discontent, is it not a little surprising that crime rates should have been falling steadily and that drug use is declining? There’s no need to award credit to the terrible governments we have groaned under, but such data do tend to dispel some of the gloom.
Again, why do we have an immigration problem at all if our economic prospects are so dire and our welfare state is being shredded? Why are the French colonising South Kensington and the Koreans commandeering New Malden? If the north-south divide is still a scandal, how come rates of unemployment across the UK have been converging for years? It was part of Alex Salmond’s argument that Scotland could afford independence because Scotland is now a rich country.
Hutton quotes Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, as denouncing excessive inequality because it “makes capitalism less inclusive” and erodes the principles of solidarity and reciprocity, and “even undermines the principles of meritocracy and democracy.” And so say all of us. But I also notice Lagarde quoted today (in my wicked right-wing newspaper) as saying that “the UK is leading the way in Europe in a very eloquent and convincing way” and that “the growth is more inclusive and better shared, sustainable and balanced—exactly the sort of result we would like to see elsewhere.”
All of which poses the question: is it not possible that the relatively low-tax, light-regulation policies of the past decades, for all their well-advertised drawbacks, have helped Britain and the United States to emerge more quickly from the recession and to expect higher growth rates than the stagnant eurozone for the next year or two?
After all, what do young French and Italian entrepreneurs give as their prime reason for setting up business in Britain? The lack of regulation, the ease of starting up and the friendly tax regime. Nor does Hutton contemplate the possibility that the answer to some pressing problems may lie in less regulation rather than more—such as the planning laws that govern the supply of building land. Some of Hutton’s wheezes sound likely to make the British economy actually less responsive to change, for instance his suggestion that a company wishing to incorporate should be compelled to declare a specific “business purpose”, which could not be tampered with by predators in pursuit of a quick buck. Would that really be the way for a company to stay light on its feet in what Hutton repeatedly calls “today’s fast-moving economy”? In earlier days, would such a rule have prevented a livery stable from selling its horses and switching over to car hire? And if it wouldn’t, what would be the point of it?
There is a significant, not to say embarrassing absentee from How Good We Can Be: the European model. Throughout Hutton’s earlier works, she was paraded on the catwalk for most of the show. Time and again, he used to emphasise that they order these things better in France, and above all in Germany. The sober, long-term, highly regulated, highly taxed systems on the continent were far superior to the frenetic capers of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. But now, in this fourth or fifth airing of his thesis, the European model is scarcely to be glimpsed. There is the odd reference to the virtues of Bayern Munich football club and of the Mittelstand, the medium-sized family firms that make up the backbone of German industry; at the end, Hutton expresses a guarded confidence that the eurozone will survive, although he concedes that “the euro is not a bed of roses”—one of the few understatements in the book. But that’s all.
In all of Hutton’s exuberant championing of reform, there is no more than a passing mention of the need to reform the European Union’s institutions. He spends much more time denouncing those “populist” parties that want out and of the disgusting right-wing press that encourages them. Yet if he seriously thinks that Britain’s future lies in being more closely locked into the EU, then reforming it ought to be his priority. But we hear scarcely a word. The plight of Greece and Italy, the terrible unemployment along the Mediterranean shores of the EU, the unrest about immigration in France and Germany—surely these things should have prompted some second thoughts.
Whatever the shortcomings of the British economy and of British politics, the EU in its present shape does not look like a plausible replacement. Will Hutton’s old thesis has had almost as long a run as Les Misérables. It may be time that he wrote a new show.
If a book’s worth writing once, it’s worth writing several times. This homely maxim has often proved a recipe for success. Will Hutton is a case in point. Twenty years ago, he had a runaway hit with The State We’re In. He followed that up with The State to Come (1997), then came The World We’re In (2002). As Hutton moved from the editor’s chair at the Observer to the Work Foundation and now to the Principal’s lodge at Hertford College, Oxford, he has stayed heroically on his own message. The title’s tweaked, but the melody lingers on.
The continentals are enlightened, the Anglo-Saxons are deluded. Europe is the future and we would be crazy to stay out of the euro. John Maynard Keynes is good, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are no good. The state is the solution, not the problem. It already showers blessings on us and would shower many more if only we could overcome our misguided suspicions. Government regulation and high taxes are the way to make us happy.
For painting in black and white Kazimir Malevich was a beginner compared to Hutton. There is no hesitation or deviation, although there is quite a bit of repetition, and rather too much of that too-tooism which we old newspaper leader writers lapse into when we’re in a hurry and lack the figures to back up our assertions. In this latest rumbustious jeremiad, How Good We Can Be, we are told three or four times on a single page that “too many” or “too few” people do this or don’t do that.
Hutton begins by telling us that “The State We’re In was that rare thing—a success that came out of nowhere,” and he goes on to quote from or refer to the prescience of his seminal work no less than 27 times by my count. The book was, we are told, the Bible of New Labour, and Tony Blair fell from grace because he failed to stick to the scripture. This is self-congratulation on an operatic scale. Hutton tells us too that he wrote How Good We Can Be in 11 weeks. He might have done better to keep this fact to himself, because the book sometimes reads that way.
He has lost none of his gift for sustained invective. Margaret Thatcher was totally frightful and her “neo-liberal project” has been an unmitigated catastrophe; ditto the “right-wing media,” which have prevented a kinder, more inclusive, less insular country from emerging. Blair gets it in the neck almost as often.
Now, we are told, is the time to make a fresh start under a revived Labour Party with the help of the Greens and the better sort of Liberal Democrat, dedicated to social liberalism and “mass flourishing.” High taxes on almost everything, a press made accountable the way Brian Leveson wants it and new forms of public ownership will set us back on track to the New Jerusalem.
Yet, oddly enough, many of Hutton’s proposals will appeal to a wider audience than social liberals and socialists. In fact, they are pretty much the new consensus: the separation between high street banks and the casino banks; a stiffer stewardship code to deter looting in the boardroom; Treasury guarantees for big construction projects; restoring the insurance base of the welfare state; a return to the old sliding scale for capital gains tax, in order to encourage long-term holding of shares; an end to the tax advantages of debt over equity; reforming council tax and giving local authorities back their financial independence. I warm to all this, and I also like Hutton’s proposals to reinvent the trade unions as co-partners with business, particularly the idea that they might set up mutually-owned service companies to sell their services to employers.
These days we are all in favour of diversifying patterns of ownership beyond the standard plc model, to include more co-operatives and also “public benefit companies,” which guarantee under charter to deliver certain public benefits and enjoy tax advantages in return. Free enterprise used to be more diverse and could be so again. The awkward truth is, though, that these alluring alternatives are no more risk-free than the old limited company. It is an awkward thought that the best-known alternative corporations of this sort over the past few years have been the Co-op, Railtrack/Network Rail and the BBC—none of them exactly without problems of governance.
But it’s Hutton’s grand narrative that seems the more rickety. We are constantly told that the past 20 or 30 years have been a disaster for the United Kingdom. Yet at the same time we are also told that “Britain has more world-class universities per head of population than any other country,” that “The triangle bounded by the M3 in the south M40 to the north and with Heathrow at its centre boasts the highest concentration of high-tech start-ups outside California and Massachusetts,” that the BBC remains the finest broadcasting service in the world, that the National Health Service is “the cheapest system in the world producing the best health results across a range of key indicators” and “on measures of effectiveness, safety, patient-centredness, co-ordination, quality and access, Britain scores number one.”
Yet it is these very organisations that have been subject to incessant reforms over the past generation, so someone must have been doing something right, or at least not too disastrously wrong. Hutton also approves of the new academy schools and the Teach First scheme, but who thought up those? If Britain is so riddled with despair and discontent, is it not a little surprising that crime rates should have been falling steadily and that drug use is declining? There’s no need to award credit to the terrible governments we have groaned under, but such data do tend to dispel some of the gloom.
Again, why do we have an immigration problem at all if our economic prospects are so dire and our welfare state is being shredded? Why are the French colonising South Kensington and the Koreans commandeering New Malden? If the north-south divide is still a scandal, how come rates of unemployment across the UK have been converging for years? It was part of Alex Salmond’s argument that Scotland could afford independence because Scotland is now a rich country.
Hutton quotes Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, as denouncing excessive inequality because it “makes capitalism less inclusive” and erodes the principles of solidarity and reciprocity, and “even undermines the principles of meritocracy and democracy.” And so say all of us. But I also notice Lagarde quoted today (in my wicked right-wing newspaper) as saying that “the UK is leading the way in Europe in a very eloquent and convincing way” and that “the growth is more inclusive and better shared, sustainable and balanced—exactly the sort of result we would like to see elsewhere.”
All of which poses the question: is it not possible that the relatively low-tax, light-regulation policies of the past decades, for all their well-advertised drawbacks, have helped Britain and the United States to emerge more quickly from the recession and to expect higher growth rates than the stagnant eurozone for the next year or two?
After all, what do young French and Italian entrepreneurs give as their prime reason for setting up business in Britain? The lack of regulation, the ease of starting up and the friendly tax regime. Nor does Hutton contemplate the possibility that the answer to some pressing problems may lie in less regulation rather than more—such as the planning laws that govern the supply of building land. Some of Hutton’s wheezes sound likely to make the British economy actually less responsive to change, for instance his suggestion that a company wishing to incorporate should be compelled to declare a specific “business purpose”, which could not be tampered with by predators in pursuit of a quick buck. Would that really be the way for a company to stay light on its feet in what Hutton repeatedly calls “today’s fast-moving economy”? In earlier days, would such a rule have prevented a livery stable from selling its horses and switching over to car hire? And if it wouldn’t, what would be the point of it?
There is a significant, not to say embarrassing absentee from How Good We Can Be: the European model. Throughout Hutton’s earlier works, she was paraded on the catwalk for most of the show. Time and again, he used to emphasise that they order these things better in France, and above all in Germany. The sober, long-term, highly regulated, highly taxed systems on the continent were far superior to the frenetic capers of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. But now, in this fourth or fifth airing of his thesis, the European model is scarcely to be glimpsed. There is the odd reference to the virtues of Bayern Munich football club and of the Mittelstand, the medium-sized family firms that make up the backbone of German industry; at the end, Hutton expresses a guarded confidence that the eurozone will survive, although he concedes that “the euro is not a bed of roses”—one of the few understatements in the book. But that’s all.
In all of Hutton’s exuberant championing of reform, there is no more than a passing mention of the need to reform the European Union’s institutions. He spends much more time denouncing those “populist” parties that want out and of the disgusting right-wing press that encourages them. Yet if he seriously thinks that Britain’s future lies in being more closely locked into the EU, then reforming it ought to be his priority. But we hear scarcely a word. The plight of Greece and Italy, the terrible unemployment along the Mediterranean shores of the EU, the unrest about immigration in France and Germany—surely these things should have prompted some second thoughts.
Whatever the shortcomings of the British economy and of British politics, the EU in its present shape does not look like a plausible replacement. Will Hutton’s old thesis has had almost as long a run as Les Misérables. It may be time that he wrote a new show.
