I spotted Will Hutton’s ‘The State We’re In’ on my Dad’s bookshelf recently, and I couldn’t help picking it up. What intrigued me was that I realised (and in fact I have realised for a while) that my general ‘opinion’ on Thatcher and the Tory legacy is partly a knee-jerk one, passed on to me by two Labour-supporting teacher parents. Not entirely, mind – I’m conscious that her project has essentially been furthered by New Labour, and it’s difficult to be unaware of the effects of that, and I always had in mind the idea (prompted by The Fatima Mansions’ ‘Only Losers Take the Bus’ I think!) of everyone being plonked on the same racetrack and told “the prize is for the taking”, only to discover it’s a kind of Wacky Races, where person starts with a broken leg, while another is in a helicopter and someone else gets to start from half-way down the track. Also, the contradiction of a party supporting the idea that “there’s no such thing as society” being the same one that blames the left for social disintegration told me enough, I thought.
And… there’s always a bit of trepidation when dipping one’s toe into new water – given that this is the first economically-oriented book I’ve read (although Hutton makes it clear from the off that he sees economics, the state, and society as inseparable topics) will I be so convinced by the rhetoric that I won’t be able to see the wood for the trees? Will I, in desiring to know more, find any critical thought stifled by one person’s force of persuasion, letting them become my super-ego? Still, you’ve got to start somewhere, and I know from past experience that, even when it happens, these intellectual/artistic etc apprenticeships are a useful and sometimes necessarily first step, even if you do eventually realise that your ‘master’ was maybe full of it at least half the time!
But it’s fascinating getting down to the mechanics – and what has struck me is not only the potency of the text (particularly the coruscating opening salvo) but also that its message is more pertinent than ever.
The irony is that Hutton wrote the book at a time when New Labour was in the ascendant (and it could have reasonably been hoped that a new era was underway) but his position is, tragically, just as relevant today. Our outmoded institutions and system of government are by their nature C(c)onservative, they safeguard the entrenched interests of financiers and the ‘gentleman’ class, and encourage corruption. As K-Punk argues in ‘Capitalist Realism’, the problems we’re saddled with are systemic so this issue of taxing bankers one year’s bonus is a thoroughly pointless, feeble gesture as a response to the crisis.
I’ve been trying to come up with a useful analogy and, though it may be flawed, this is the result: a spoiled teenager drunkenly crashes his expensive sports car while driving at an excessive speed (it’s not the first time he’s done that, obviously. On more than one occasion, he has narrowly avoided killing people). Rather then making him work to pay for a new one, or suggest public transport as an option (they are, after all, the people who have indulged his every whim), they immediately buy him a new one because, of course, he does also need it to get around - but they insist that, as a punishment, he can’t go to the big party coming up the next weekend. He sneaks out of the house and goes anyway. When his parents find out, they threaten to take his car away. He threatens to move out. They start crying because they don’t want him to leave – he’s their only son, they have given him everything. How can they make him understand that he needs to be more responsible?
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I was born in 1978. Something else that I realised reading Hutton’s book is that I’ve never known anything other than what happened after the financial genie was let out of the bottle. I have no idea how things could feel outside this. I remember my parents (SDP/Labour, remember) living on credit, buying beyond their means. I even asked once, something along the lines of ‘but if you don’t have the money, why are you buying a new sofa AND a new car?’ But that’s how they lived, and they were encouraged to do so. I remember discussing (heatedly) the modesty of my own financial ambitions with a girlfriend - for her it was tantamount to not having ambitions of any sort. She talked about the big house, the car, the holidays. After a three-year relationship, she left me for a trader!
DAVID
