Changing Britain – Why We Need A Fair Society

 

 

I have been reading Will Hutton‘s latest book for the last couple of weeks and am now through the first 5 chapters, at the time of writing this Post!  To my mind, it’s a very powerful and extremely well-argued summary of the sickness that has engulfed Britain, and by implication, other countries who have had similar experiences over the last 20 years.

There was a long extract published by the Guardian on the 26th September 2010 which gives one a good feel for the book.  Here’s how that extract starts:

The British are a lost tribe – disoriented, brooding and suspicious. They have lived through the biggest bank bail-out in history and the deepest recession since the 1930s, and they are now being warned that they face a decade of unparalleled public and private austerity. Yet only a few years earlier their political and business leaders were congratulating themselves on creating a new economic alchemy of unbroken growth based on financial services, open markets and a seemingly unending credit and property boom. As we know now, that was a false prospectus. All that had been created was a bubble economy and society. Yet while the country is now exhorted to tighten its belt and pay off its debts, those who created the crisis — the country’s CEOs and bankers, still living on Planet Extravagance, not to mention mainstream politicians — all want to get back to “business as usual”: the world of 1997 to 2007.

There are many, many sentences in the book that have one gasping for breath.  One of them that particular struck me was one on Page 13, see below for the sentence in italics.  But let me include sufficient text to put the sentence into context:

Today, philanthropy or living according to a particular moral code does not confer status.  Only money is able to do that.  People start to question whether vocational career choices – in farming, teaching, medicine or science – make any sense when society rewards them so lowly while rewarding finance so high.  Material values start to crowd out altruism, philanthropy and restraint.

Then comes this staggering reflection:

Two incidents in September 2007 highlighted the new values.  Lance Bombardier Ben Parkinson, who lost both legs after a landmine exploded in Afghanistan, was offered £152,000 compensation by the Ministry of Defence.  The very same week, Eric Nicoli left his job as CEO of EMI – having failed to turn around the company – with a pay-off of £3 million. [My italics]

Earlier, on page 6, Hutton writes of Richard Lambert, head of the Confederation of British Industry, the CBI as having said in March 2010, “for the first time in history officers of a company can become seriously rich without risking any of their own money.”   Here’s another piece from that extract published in the Guardian:

We need a shared understanding of what constitutes fairness in order to restore our society. At present, there is none. The rich argue that it is fair for them to be so wealthy, in much the same way as Athenian noblemen believed that their riches were signifiers of their worth. They believe they owe little or nothing to society, government or public institutions. They accept no limit or proportionality to their wealth, benchmarking themselves only against their fellow rich. Philanthropic giving is declining; tax avoidance is rising; and executive pay is rising exponentially. All three are justified by the doctrine that the rich simply deserve to be rich. Meanwhile, the poor, in their view – and that of a virulent right-wing media – largely deserve their plight because they could have chosen otherwise. The mockery of chavs is premised on the assumption that they could be different if they wanted to be. The poor could work, save and show some initiative. So why should we indulge them by giving them state handouts?

This lies behind the arrogance with which bankers still defend their bonuses, in spite of everything that has happened over the past few years.

OK, you get my drift! I could go on and on but, hopefully, my point is made.  This book by Hutton is going to be another of his classics and may well be seen as the ‘tipping point’ when society looks back in a decade’s time with that wonderful 20:20 hindsight!

Finally, are there other conclusions to be made of Hutton’s approach?  Yes, of course.  Reading the comments posted on the Guardian web page will show you many.

By Paul Handover