Will Hutton’s books are immensely popular in Britain. On the flyleaf of his latest work, Them and Us, Britain’s most authoritative establishment economic commentator, Martin Wolf, is quoted as saying: “Will Hutton’s ability to articulate contemporary anxieties borders on genius.” This is a fair assessment of his work, if only because contemporary British anxieties are profound, while the ideas formed to express them are somewhat less so.
Since at least 1979 British society has operated under suffocating notions about the innate superiority of markets. Only the market could determine priorities rationally – the role of the state was to provide a “level playing field” for market forces to work optimally. A government whose (modified) brand included the word “Labour” did little to challenge these ideas either ideologically or at the level of policy. Indeed, in many areas (PFI, workfare, outsourcing and so on) they expanded them. These are the sources of the current popular confusion on economic ideas, which is reflected in Them and Us.
Neither Them nor Us is ever satisfactorily defined. The book’s subtitle is Changing Britain – Why We Need a Fair Society and the first 117 pages are devoted to a muddled discussion on the nature of fairness. Readers of The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett will learn a great deal more from a much livelier read.
There is, generally, a worrying tendency in Hutton’s work to drag in all sorts of attractive-sounding commentaries and analyses without considering their true value. This magpie approach leads to overblown and unsupported assertion in equal measure. So Hutton cites research which he claims demonstrates that human beings invariably follow a golden rule – do as you would be done by (page 90). The actual title of the research is The Neuroscience of Fair Play: Why We (Usually) Follow the Golden Rule with all the attendant reservations and academic qualifications. This is not an isolated example, with perhaps the greatest howler the assertion that both Adam Smith and Karl Marx failed to comprehend the role of the Enlightenment in relation to the vigorous development of early capitalism.
The middle section of the book comprises an enumeration of some of the key financial aspects of the recent crisis. But its main economic causes and features are never addressed. So while there are more than 100 references to “innovation” and many more besides to “entrepreneurs” there is no index reference to either investment or to profits.
Yet the Great Recession was a classic investment slump, comprising 70 per cent of the British downturn and three-quarters of the recession in the OECD as a whole. The private sector’s unwillingness to invest in the absence of growing profitability remains the key impediment to economic recovery. Instead, all efforts have been made to drive up profits by driving down wages, which has had some success. The final section of the book deals with some recommendations to achieve greater fairness. In this role Hutton has been signed up by the Tory-led coalition government to report on greater fairness in public sector pay. Hutton’s prescriptions here include everything from fairer votes to increased local powers to correcting global imbalances. He is strongly in favour of increased government borrowing to boost the economy, which will not endear him to the coalition. But then he is not being asked to advise on any of these, just fairer public sector pay. Permanent secretaries, health trust chief executives and the rest can all expect many harsh words, maybe even a short term pay freeze of exceptionally high salaries. But it has another purpose.
Will Hutton’s report is due at the same time as the report by Frank Field into poverty. Field has none of Hutton’s progressive instincts and will be the anvil to Iain Duncan-Smith’s hammer on the poor, while encouraging the Tories to redefine poverty almost out of existence. Hutton has been around politicians long enough to know that his own efforts will be a “fair”diversion while another major assault is launched upon the poor.
Michael Burke
