This Time No Mistakes by Will Hutton

I have admired Will Hutton for many years and devoured his book, The State We Are In, and his writing in the Observer. His most recent book is This Time No Mistakes - how to remake Britain.

Following a helpful introduction, Hutton begins by exploring the economic story of the USA. He looks at the freewheeling entrepreneurs: JP Morgan in banking and Carnegie in steel and their push for monopoly. [the links are to posts I have written for my History of British Manufacturing.] The monopolies were countered by antitrust legislation. The otherwise free market system though had inbuilt instability and banks and businesses crashed all too often  After four decades of spectacular growth, the Wall Street crash and subsequent Great Depression demanded action which took the form of Roosevelt’s New Deal. 

This had three main strands: regulation, the provision of credit with protection and a massive investment in infrastructure with a focus on employing those otherwise out of work.  So we have the federal mortgage lenders, the SEC and a raft of social security legislation. It worked and formed the consensus of western economics for nearly half a century. Hutton acknowledges also the massive benefit to the US economy of production for WW2 of which I wrote in War on Wheels and Dunkirk to D Day.

The consensus began to crack in the seventies with the oil shocks and inflation.  Hutton suggests that it was raised interest rates to cool inflation that led to the strengthening dollar and the flight of US manufacturing overseas. In the UK, as I wrote in Vehicles to Vaccines, it was North Sea oil that had a similar effect. Hutton suggests, in a later chapter, that UK interest rates raised for the same reason added to the strength of sterling.

The forces of the right, believing in the market and the small state, were ready in the wings and entered the scene with Ronald Reagan as the charismatic US face; much the same as Margaret Thatcher.

Neither Clinton nor Obama altered this new direction and left  a country of disgruntled former workers ready to embrace Trump's  brand of nationalism.

This very much sets the scene for the book.

Hutton then looks at the Tory years with particular focus on Thatcher and the way manufacturing was decimated. He explores the Brexit arguments and then the failed administrations of May, Johnson and Truss.

The next focus is on laissez faire and the way successive governments have embraced this doctrine combined with the straight-jacket of the small state.

In critiquing the doctrine he draws on the writing of Adam Smith, Chadwick and Engels, the action of Luddites, Tolpuddle martyrs and the Chartists, and finds practical examples of good practice in the Rochdale Cooperative and Robert Owen’s New Lanark. Interesting for me who has written on him he draws on John Ruskin's works on political economy in particular Unto his Last. Hutton of course writes on Marx and his critics.

1859 was a key date with the formation of the Liberal party. Hutton follows this by writing on influential thinkers: Green, Hobson, Hobhouse and their pupils Asquith and Keynes. 

Interestingly he quotes from Churchill's Poverty: the study of town life

“ A poverty-stricken working class could not possibly spend sufficiently to drive the economy forwards, while the aristocratic elite and upper-middle class were too small to compensate. Instead, they saved, with the savings’ surfeit flowing overseas to empire and the financing of other countries’ industries.” 

I have to observe that this is what we are witnessing in today's economy.

The growing union movement and the Liberal party found common cause and together selected Lib/Lab parliamentary candidates.

A somewhat belated fruition of this was the reforming Liberal Government of 1906-1911 and Lloyd George's budget.

I found it interesting that in 1918 when the franchise was enlarged to give the vote to some women, consideration was given but rejected for proportional representation, a topic to which Hutton returns a number of times in the book.

The interwar years contained the disastrous return to the Gold Standard and the hardship this caused. It contained too the ground breaking writing of Keynes whose influence Hutton warmly embraces. Sadly for Britain, governments did not share in the embrace but instead built tariff barriers around Imperial Preference which shielded Britain from healthy competition. The adherence to the small city remained key.

Moving to the post-war, Hutton rejoices in Beveridge and is admiring of Attlee and his government. He possibly offers warmer praise for Harold Macmillan and his Middle Way.

As a critique of post-war industry, Hutton offers this:

“ cosseted, dividend-hungry, rentier shareholders, aggressive shop stewards, disengaged finance and unenterprising managements looking for safety behind tariffs and cartels, rather than putting money into research and new products.” 

This is very much what I found in my research into British manufacturing since 1951 as expressed in Vehicles to Vaccines.

Looking at governments, he sees missed opportunities and barriers. For Wilson the barriers were the multiplicity of trades unions, but also a city wedded to laissez faire. Heath is criticised, but Hutton points out that he did want to remove barriers that reduce competition. The SDP and Blairism in practice are both filled with missed opportunities, although the Blair/Brown years did bring vital change, not least in the focus on early years in Sure Start.

Looking at a way forward Hutton would like to seeing a co-operation of New Liberal and Ethical Socialist. The fundamental shift through is from the emphasis on the 'I' to the 'We'. He draws on the thinking of the Fairness Foundation. 

There is much to be done. Hutton suggests that massive investment is needed to counter climate change, in infrastructure, skills, scientific research and levelling up. Increased borrowing would be possible if lenders could see that their money is being wisely spent. Increased taxation would be needed to service the debt. Our tax take is lower than many countries - but a poorly designed tax system needs attention. 

A sovereign wealth fund is needed. Hutton looks at how British funds and banks currently invest - most goes to real estate and overseas. This needs to be reversed.

Housing, education and health care are key issues where those already on the ladder not only have massive advantage but also live in silos removed from the rest of society.

None of this will just happen. A whole host of national and business governance issues need to be address in tandem. Hutton does not avoid the elephant in the room: we must build a vibrant relationship with the EU.

"The aim must be to create an environmentally sustainable, high-productivity Britain that is less unequal, fairer and economically dynamic, and which, while global in its reach, is firmly anchored in its own continent. That is what Britain must invest for – a ‘We Society’ around which the private and public sectors can coalesce."

Wearing our Poppies not only with pride

Just one week after Remembrance Day we commemorate the final day of the Battle of the Somme and I find myself pondering that word, pride.

I am immensely proud of our service men and women, but ask whether it was it pride that compelled those politicians and generals to send thousands of boys, defenceless against streams of machine gun bullets? Perhaps some thought that the enemy could be overrun if enough were sent.

I have been researching accounts of the Great War with a view possibly to writing a ‘Prequel’ to my book, War on Wheels. I thought I already knew much of what happened in those years 1914 to 1918. I didn’t know the half; indeed I still don’t. Yet what I have unearthed sheds a very a different light on Remembrance, on the idea of wearing my poppy with pride.

So, I search for other words. Do I wear my poppy with thanks. The answer is ‘yes’, I do thank each and every one of those boys who gave their lives. But what of those who had their lives snatched from them, cruelly dragged from them?

There are stories of young men in 1914 desperate for adventure, desperate for the chance of standing up for King and Country. Pumped up with adrenaline, or do I mean testosterone, ready to give the enemy the hiding they deserved. I am sure there were some; but just how many met a quite different reality? Trench warfare was obscene beyond anything we can comprehend.

Following on from those seeking adventure were the pals, the battalions made up of men from the same village or workplace. Who wouldn’t step up to support a pal? There were those stepping forward out of a sense of duty or patriotism. There were those shamed by a white feather into volunteering. The fate though was the same. I try to imagine, but fail. Arriving in the trenches surrounded by mud and death must have shocked to the core even the strongest man. On the command to go forward, was it possible to think at all, staggering into the hail of bullets?

So, do I wear my poppy with sympathy? The word surely is too weak for the feelings of those who received the dreaded telegram telling them that their husband, son or brother was dead, or possibly worse, missing. Grossly inadequate for those enduring an unimaginably hideous death from gas or gangrene. Insufficiently enduring for those thousands who would carry a wound for the rest of their lives.

If not sympathy or thanks, then what? Shame?

Governments sending young men to war are doing so on behalf of the electorate, at least in theory. So is the poppy a mark of shame that so many were needlessly slaughtered? This is not the same as saying that the war should never have been fought, it is much more about ensuring that those who offer their bodies in the service of their country are protected to the best extent possible. Winston Churchill’s campaign for the tank was just this, to offer a means of protection against machine gun bullets.

Shame though devalues the sacrifice made by so many. Heartbreak then, that the land of Europe endured such suffering. Heartbreak for those who suffered agony and those who suffered loss.

More so though, to wear a poppy to make sure that we never forget. What happened in those years 1914-1918 was meant to end all wars. It didn’t, but it still could if those in power took seriously the lessons of history.

This piece was published in the Lincolnshire Echo on 3 November 2016

Bad old ways?

The Observer (14 June) offered in its leader a stark warning to the city and those concrned with its governance that it must not be allowed to slip back into its bad old ways. I am probably not the only person who would wish to take issue with the word old; the bad ways were new, the bad ways were post big bang, the bad ways emerged because light touch regulation allowed them to. A most telling comment was that the old (I would say new) way of doing things made some people very rich.'

Vested interests are thus very strong and very powerful. In exactly the same way as it was not in the interests of the city to say the emperor had no clothes, neither is it in their interests to question the substance of what might look like the green shoots of recovery. Anything which shows that the city is working is good news.

The tragedy is that just when strong government is need, we are having to live with a lame duck. It is sadder still that when a change in government does come, the forces which demand a strong performance from the city will both be vocal and may well be basking in a recovery of their own making.