A former broker, scourge of Thatcherism in the Guardian’s business pages and, later, editor of the Observer, Will Hutton has carved out a distinctive niche for himself in Britain as a defender of the social-market model. His 1995 best-seller The State We’re In caught the public mood in the dying years of Conservative rule. It not only lambasted the sleaze and social failure of the government but linked this to Britain’s oligarchic and antiquated political system, with its House of Lords, royal prerogative, unelected quangos and parliamentary majorities based on a minority of the popular vote. Hutton’s critique was not inspired by any socialist animosity to capitalism, however. Instead, he called for a democratized Britain to make good the ravages of Thatcherism by adopting the ethos and institutions of European ‘stakeholder’ capitalism.
The term itself comes not from the lexicon of political movements, whether Christian or Social Democratic, but from management philosophy: rather than placing shareholder interest above all others, the stakeholder approach claimed to give due weight to the interests of the workforce and community. In Hutton’s view, the model not only promoted the negotiation of progressive social benefits but fostered world-beating enterprises, based on a highly skilled workforce—unlike Anglo-Saxon stock-exchange capitalism, which gave free rein to the short-termism and herd instinct of bankers and money managers.
When Blair adopted the phrase in a ‘vision’ speech in the run-up to the 1997 election, Hutton naturally had hopes that his ideas would be put into effect. From the Observer, which he edited from 1996 to 1998, he offered loyal criticism of the new government’s course. But stakeholding was construed by business leaders to be code for government intervention, and the longed-for invitation to join the administration as a New Labour advisor never arrived. Hutton became bogged down in the attempt to restore the Observer’s flagging fortunes, the edge of his editorials blunted by the hope that Blair and Brown would see the light. There were, of course, many elements of the government’s programme that met with his approval: the Scottish parliament, attempts to remove most of the hereditary peers, support for US intervention in the Balkans, promises of more money for public services. Tactful criticism and dialogue with Anthony Giddens seemed the appropriate response. (Another editor, equally sympathetic to New Labour, took a more dynamic approach. First at the Independent and then at the Daily Express, Rosie Boycott’s vigorous campaigns against drug laws and the miserly treatment of old-age pensioners appeared to have far greater success in shifting public opinion and, to a lesser extent, government policy, than did muted appeals or telephone chats with Downing Street.)
In The World We’re In, Hutton now dispenses with most of his lingering inhibitions and identifies Blair and Brown as politicians who have succumbed to the ‘bear-hug’ of neoliberalism—or ‘American conservatism’, as he rather confusingly calls it. For Hutton, the project ‘at the heart of [New Labour’s] third way is the attempt to marry incompatible value systems—American conservatism and a modernized European social democracy. It is an exercise doomed to failure’.
It should be pointed out that the ‘world’ under consideration here is mainly that of the advanced countries, minus Japan—there are no index entries at all for China, India or Russia. The polemical axis of the book is Europe versus America; an interesting enough topic in its own right. Hutton argues that the United States and Europe represent starkly contrasting civilizations. The US offers the sad spectacle of a society sharply polarized by wealth—three million millionaires and members of gated communities—and deprivation, with over fifty million living at or below the poverty line. In between are middle and working-class Americans whose incomes have stagnated for nearly three decades. Hutton checks off the most evident signs of social regression: the two million, mainly black, prison inmates; the 50,000 who die of gun-related deaths every two years; big-money politics, and so forth. He detects a dangerous growth of selfishness and introversion—Americans spend an average of 72 minutes each day alone in their cars, and four hours watching television.
He unkindly reports that, according to the Surgeon General, 61 per cent of the population are either overweight or obese (he might have explained that, whether at home or in school, American children are subjected to insistent ads recommending sweets for breakfast, liquid candy and assorted fast foods). For the richest society in the world, US health statistics are very spotty. Even in areas of excellence, like higher education, it is, in the main, the offspring of the upper and upper-middle-class who reap the benefit. While Hutton’s portrait of the United States has its own conventional features, echoing standard European tropes, he also cites evidence to undermine the cherished American myth that it is a land of high social mobility, with opportunities open to everyone.
Drawing on Daniel Lazare’s Frozen Republic, Hutton argues that the deep-rooted flaws of the US political system have conspired to weaken the country’s liberal and progressive tradition and to entrench the power of corporations and special interests—thus extending to the US the critical focus on the nature of the state addressed to the UK in his earlier book. The late-eighteenth-century Constitution enshrines a concept of the state that strews obstacles in the path of progressive political forces, while allowing conservatives to invoke the sacred founding document to justify market freedoms. The electoral system protects the two major parties by erecting formidable barriers to any third-party challenge; it allows rich suburbs to opt out of inner city problems. The unleashing of Political Action Committees allowed big money to shape both parties’ agenda. (Hutton could have added that the broadcasting industry itself has a huge vested interest in perverting campaign-finance reform, due to the bounteous fees it receives from campaign managers.)