BOOKBUSTER REVIEW – This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain
By Will Hutton
Published by Head of Zeus, £10.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
It is close to 30 years since Hutton’s most influential book, The State We’re In, first came out. In that book he argued that ‘altruism and the civilising values of an inclusive society have been sacrificed on the altar of self-interest, of choice, of opting out and of individualism’. Some reviews, such as David Aaronovitch, took issue with that as too simplistic, and as a sentence taken out of context it is.
Nonetheless, it is difficult, all these years later, not to agree with Hutton, and in fact say the same thing even more loudly. In his new book, he gives the first few chapters over to an analysis of events that have led to the mess we are in today. As I have argued here in previous reviews, Liz Truss was not the aberration she is seen to be, but merely a less cautious and more stupid expression of the logic of post-1979 neoliberal Tory economic ideology. And that is pretty much Hutton’s position, too. It would be interesting to see what Aaronovitch thinks of that 29 years on – I suspect he may be less quick to dismiss the argument.
The book features a blurb from our new PM, no less, who said it is ‘brilliant’. As always with Kier Starmer, he less U-turns than spins like a gyroscope. I wonder what he would say today now his and Reeves’s announced economic policies seem so at odds with Hutton’s suggestions. The prescriptions for change start with addressing inequality and poverty, and require ‘British capitalism’ to change radically, indeed it must ‘work for the common good’, not just for shareholders. This is obvious good sense, as our recent experience with Southern Water’s underinvestment in infrastructure repair drives home.
WORKFORCES NEED TO BE ENFRANCHISED
Spending, here, unlike with Starmer and Reeves’ unfunny Tory-lite routine, must start now, on a large scale, to repair 15 years of damage, and to ‘drive productivity’ in both the public and private sectors. This emphasis on both public and private spheres, marrying ‘socialism’ to ‘progressive liberalism’ should sound familiar. We are, here, slap-dab in the middle of the 1990s’ ‘Third Way’, a ‘sensible compromise’ formulated by writers like Hutton and of course sociologist Anthony Giddens. This ‘renewal of social democracy’ failed then, in part because of Blair’s neoliberal bent as evidenced by the foolish over-use of the fiscal ‘private finance initiative’, and also his liking for the ‘communitarianism’ he took from Amitai Etzioni, which tended to push an unbalanced path to ‘rights and responsibilities’ that more than somewhat leaned on the latter at the expense of the former. So far, Reeves has talked up renewal of the PFI agenda, which as before will simply increase debt for yet another generation or two.
Nevertheless, for those of us who actually read Giddens books, ‘third way’ policies did have some rational basis. Blairism did not do any favours to the way posterity views the ‘third way’, but Hutton, to a degree, seeks to revive aspects of the concept. For many on the left, it is too compromising with the capitalist order, but pragmatically it is clearly far better than the neoliberal garage-sale the Tories have pursued. How to actualise such policies in the face of our nation’s greed-driven ideology is another issue, of course.
As Hutton said on an LSE blog, ‘I thought when I finished writing the book that the ideas and policies might be too ambitious for Starmer’s Labour party. I want to lift the economy by decisively raising public investment, reshaping our savings and investment ecosystem so it dramatically raises its support for business and to reconfigure our capitalism around the delivery of great purposes rather than putting profit first. Our tech sector needs careful nourishing rather than to be sold off abroad. Workforces need to be enfranchised.’
MORE OF A REFORMING GOVERNMENT THAN MOST EXPECT
I for one think he was correct to suspect Starmer would find such a blueprint too radical, but at the same time it is of a piece with the caution exhibited in the PM’s recent statements. Hutton critiques the late 1920s Labour governments of Ramsay MacDonald, saying they ‘lacked the self-confidence and the will to make dysfunctional capitalism work better’: we can only hope Starmer is more forthright, as forthright in a good cause as he has been on, say, the bad causes of suppressing the Labour left and of punishing a human response to the destruction of Gaza. That would do it.
Hutton takes a positive, if out-of-touch, cultural stance. He wants to see a new public sphere of debate, noting, quite rightly, that ‘the common good, and the ability of individuals to live lives they value and find meaningful, are interdependent’. But, post-lockdown and against a global rise of the far-right, one that as Hutton notes, grows and grows ‘in the fertile soil of economic and social distress’, it is hard to see how to get there from here. At least, not without a far more iron-willed curbing of capitalist greed and of the mass media, alongside much more enabling welfare reforms such as a Universal Basic Income. Hutton’s prescriptions do not go far enough toward these ends, and Starmer’s certainly don’t seem to, in fact as Reeves’s cuts indicate, quite the reverse may be the case.
On the LSE blog, Hutton ended on a positive note: ‘If Starmer meant what he said [when describing the book], Labour may be more of a reforming government than most expect. Perhaps this time there will be no mistakes.’ It is too early to tell, of course, the signs are ambiguous. Personally, I think they auger badly, but let’s hope I am pleasantly surprised.
This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
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