This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
In 1995, two years before Sir Tony Blair put an abrupt end to eighteen years of Conservative rule by inflicting the party’s heaviest defeat in almost a century, Will Hutton published a major warning that Britain was on a political course that risked damaging the very fabric of its society. The State We’re In, which spent six months as the number one bestseller on the hardback list, argued that the civilising values of an inclusive society had been sacrificed on the altar of self-interest and individualism, blaming the untamed market forces that epitomized the Iron Lady’s premiership for bringing about a collapse of social cohesion.
Fast forward 30 years and Hutton’s latest book, This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain, is set to be released against a remarkably similar backdrop. Austerity, Brexit and Covid cronyism have all sought to sow divisions between the haves and the have-nots, the ins and the outs and the well-connected and less well-connected in a sure sign that the dial is firmly primed on the individual. Over four terms and five prime ministers, the Conservatives have succeeded in, as Hutton puts it, over-emphasising the “I’ while the left haplessly scrambles to find an electorally attractive way of making the case for “We”, and it is still to be seen whether the current Labour offering has got the answers to that particular conundrum.
But while conventional political thinking would suggest that a corrective swing to the left is in order, contemporary wisdom is putting paid to the outmoded assertion that society lives somewhere in the middle of a dogfight between the socialist values of the left and the free market capitalist beliefs of the right. Could they, in fact, coexist together? It is a theory Hutton put to me in a recent interview for The London Economic, describing it as being like having economic ladders that every individual can climb while simultaneously having a social floor below which they cannot fall. Crucially, he says, the vitality of the two must be interdependent, which is the very notion upon which we as a business publication with a strong social conscience were founded in 2013, not long after the financial crash.
That event, in its enormity, primed people’s attention on how the weaknesses of an economy cannot be divorced from problems in the rest of society. The belief that capitalism would be able to self-organise and self-regulate was blown away by a financial meltdown that exposed the fragility of an economy allowed to operate without guide rails, resulting in years of pernicious inequality as government debt soared and the global economy fumbled. The resultant austerity programme introduced by Cameron and Osborne was driven, as the UN’s special rapporteur on poverty once put it, by the desire to get across a simple message that the state “no longer has your back”, that the system should be as unwelcoming as possible and that people who need benefits should be reminded constantly that they are lucky to get anything. Little wonder the British people were so willing to protest when a vote came in 2016.
Yet to suggest that the country has turned its back on capitalism in the face of the inequality it has wrought would be misguided. Businesses have ideas, they incentivise people to get up in the morning, to change things and, when done rightly, help others change things too. Ground that in strong social foundations and make purpose a major impetus and you’ve got a force to be reckoned with, or so Hutton would have you believe. And given that I’ve spent the last decade building a newspaper advocating for such a model, I’d be hard-pressed to disagree.
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