The
lecture was a mess since it was filled with his verbal humour that didn't
translate well to print. I hope that this editing is true. I
changed almost nothing but added formatting and took out a number of "actually"s
and a lot of dead space "and"s that were probably nervous elocutionary
tics. Sally, if you are familiar with it and want to correct anything
please do so and let me know. Coming from another culture that thinks in
thousands of years I don't find his comments strange at all.
Ray Evans
Harrell
Background Briefing - 15/12/2002: Will Hutton: The European Lecture
[This is the print version of story
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s749188.htm]
Will Hutton's
book, 'The World We're In', will be published in paperback in Australia by
Penguin in May 2003
Kirsten Garrett: The Cheltenham
Literature Festival in the United Kingdom has become an important international
event, with people attending in the thousands. At this year’s festival, the
European Lecture was given by former economics editor of The Guardian newspaper,
Will Hutton. Will Hutton is also a former editor of The Observer, a columnist,
author and Chief Executive of the Work Foundation.
Hallo, I’m Kirsten Garrett and this is Background
Briefing.
Will Hutton’s speech was an argument that Britain retain its
core values, and its connections with a European social framework. As the world
shapes itself over the next few years and faces economic and military crisis,
there is a European idea of the good society that must form the benchmark for
politicians to succeed, he says. Britain must align with Europe, not America.
INTRODUCTION
Will Hutton: In the Bush doctrine, that 50-page statement by
the State Department, setting out what America’s foreign policy would be over
the foreseeable future, and reserving the right to pre-emptively and
unilaterally, militarily engage with countries that the United States considered
to be a rogue State, or constitute a threat in some way to American security, in
which the American President would be judge and jury of whether or not they
constituted a threat to American security, a chilling enough view of
international relations in my view, there was also embedded in that doctrine
a judgement about what constitutes the benchmark, if you like, of the good
economy and good society. And that was absolutely overtly, the way the
American organised their economy and the way they organised their society, and
the way they organised their democracy. That’s the benchmark in the
Bush doctrine by which the rest of the world will be seen to or not comply with
good standards. And for me, what I want to use this lecture for, is to assert
that there is another way of organising economy in society, that actually for
all our differences, there are many,, that we in Europe have a different
approach to organising our economy in society. And that in many respects, if
you start with the values that we in Europe have, I believe the outcomes are at
least equal to if not superior to those, in the United States.
Moreover within the United States, and here’s another reason why I think
the next two or three years are going to be the most important in setting the
likely geography of events in the first two decades of the 21st century, within
the United States itself, there is a fierce argument about what constitutes the
good economy and good society, and what America’s relationship should be with
the rest of the world.
It
was Bill Clinton, at the Labour Party Conference the week before last, it was Al
Gore the week before that, it’s Senator Daschle, the majority leader in the
Senate, Richard Gephart, the Democrat leader in the House of Representatives,
all of whom have insisted that the United States must engage with the rest of
the world multilaterally, and that any attack on Iraq must be multilateral. Legitimate within the framework of
international law according to UN resolutions.
That is
not the view of the Pretorian Guard around George Bush Junior, whether it’s the
Vice President, whether it’s the Secretary for State, (whether) for Defence, whether it’s the intellectuals and
think-tanks and corporate defence interests around them, they take a different
view. Their view is that
America has a responsibility to itself above any other, but also to the world,
to impose at the limit this view of what constitutes the good economy in society
on the rest, and to act not just unilaterally, but pre-emptively, to assert that
view.
I.
"Tony Blair has been playing a very risky game [by] trying to have a
place at the Bush Cabinet table."
Now
within America this argument is really dichotomising between the two great
seaboards, the East and West seaboard, the areas around the Great Lakes, and the
rest of the United States. Within America, there are people who would agree with
me. Actually it shouldn’t be ever forgotten that Al Gore won a majority of
votes in the 2000 Presidential elections, who would agree with me that
actually what I’m going to lay out in the next few minutes and the values that
underpin a good economy and good society, are ones America shares too. But this
argument about, if you like, how globalisation should be governed, whether it
should be governed multilaterally in all its manifestations, the security
dimension, and the environmental dimension, the economic dimension, the
financial market dimension, or whether it should be run around American
interests and preoccupations unilaterally by the United States, is one battle
that is being joined now, and I’ve absolutely no doubt there’s no question, that
is British national interest, that we assert the multilateral way of doing
things.
We as a
country benefit from globalisation governed this way, our entire relationship to
international law, our relationship to the rest of the world, demands that we
take that view, and I think that Tony Blair has been playing a very risky game
in aligning himself not with those voices in America who share that view, but
actually trying to have a place at the Bush Cabinet table, because he thinks
that’s the best way of influencing events, even though I think he probably at
the limit, shares my view. That’s one giant argument that’s being waged and the
outcomes of which it’s not clear what they’re going to be, but which are going
to be decisive in shaping our world over the next two decades.
And there’s another argument about what constitutes, as I say, the
good economy and the good society. And here I want to place another
proposition on the table: we British may speak a different language from the
other 350-million members of the European Union, but we are European too. We
like to think that our position with America and Europe is such that the English
Channel is as wide as the Atlantic Ocean, and that we sit somewhere between
these two great civilisations. I’m going to argue in this lecture, that actually
the English Channel really is only 21 miles wide at its narrowest point, and
that our history, our values, and our interests are fundamentally European, that
all we Europeans have been to the same experience, we’ve lived under the Roman
Empire, we went through Renaissance and Reformation, we expanded internationally
at the same time. We built overseas empires, we went through industrialisation,
we had our difficulties with the Catholic church, Protestant-Catholic, we
industrialised, we urbanised, we produced parties of the working class that
champion socialism and some at the limit, communism. And all that has
produced at the beginning of the 21st century, a complex of values which all
Europeans subscribe to more or less, and that what defines us in Europe is that
commonality of interest.
What’s been happening in the States, the immigrants from Europe, which
took with them European values, is that that remains there of course, but that’s
been moulded and transformed and over the last 25, 30 years, there’s been a
phenomenon in America which has begun to mean that there is a definite cleavage
in the West between the conception of what represents a good economy and good
society. We’ve watched over the last 30 years, starting in the middle of the
1970s, the rise of the American Right, not just the rise of the Republican
party, well that’s part of it, not just the intellectuals who supported the
nostrums, free markets, deregulation, anti-State, anti-tax, where that’s part of
it; we saw an assertion of, if you like, and I think this is quite an
interesting way of looking at it and so you may find it helpful, in a way the
States of the Confederacy, the Old South that lost the Civil War in 1865, have
begun to reassert themselves, the centre of economic, social and cultural
gravity in the States has moved south and west, and that those southern states
constitute a very different way of looking at the world from the north.
II.
"It’s become very difficult indeed in the States to say, ‘I’m a
Liberal and I’m proud of it’, it’s almost a tag as bad as being a communist in
the era of McCarthyism."
There’s been
that. There’s been the influence of money on American politics, which has made
it harder and harder to argue for ideas of the social contract for
redistribution of income, for assertion of the public interest in the States.
This confluence of events with some brilliant politicians, Ronald Reagan
exploiting the backlash of the urban working class in the States, against
affirmative action, have built a new coalition, a coalition that took Newt
Gingrich to power in the early 1990s, and which Bush Junior exploited again in
2000. They don’t just hold political power, they actually dominate the
country culturally, they dominate it intellectually, it’s become very difficult
indeed in the States to say, ‘I’m a Liberal and I’m proud of it’, it’s almost a
tag as bad as being a communist in the era of
McCarthyism.
Now
this has constructed a very different set of values at the centre of American
policymaking, although as I say, the country is very divided. The arguments
between Democrats and Republicans, between liberals and conservatives in the
States are as acute as they’ve ever been in that country, because these
arguments go to the heart of what it means to be an individual in
society.
Now
let me just run through what I think the three great clusters of values are that
unite Europeans and which American liberals also passionately believe
in.
The first is a belief in the social contract. A belief that
there is such a thing as society and that all human beings - because they don’t
know, (if you just conduct a little thought experiment) -if you just all think
of yourselves now - imagine that you didn’t know that you were going to be born
into a family living in Cheltenham - you couldn’t tell - that you had no idea
what the circumstance of your life would be, you were just ignorantly making a
judgement about what kind of society you would want to be born into.
Question:
·
would you want it to have some guarantee of minimum income?
·
Would you want it to underwrite your social rights?
·
Would you want it to have, not knowing whether you going to be
rich or poor,
·
would you want it to have a health service providing health for
everybody free at the point of use?
·
Would you want it to have an educational structure which gave
every child an opportunity to maximise his or her potential?
·
Would you want it to be understood that be you high, be you low,
there will be a roof over your head, and not just subsistence income, but
reasonable income, by which you could live?
Now Europeans answer that question, Yes.
Passionate belief that a social contract is the precondition for
living in a just order.
American
liberals agree.
American
conservatives say No.
- They say that that is immoral.
- They say that the redistribution of income from those who
work really hard and thus show themselves to be moral beings and industrious
beings, to those who have not worked hard because they are poor, morally
undercuts the moral basis of that society.
- They say that the agency that would actually enforce such
redistribution or put in place the social contract, must be the State, and
that State is definitionally coercive,
that there is no difference between the State of the Soviet Union, and
the State of the Gulag, the State of Communist China, and a State which puts
in place a social contract. At the limit, they are all coercive, they
constrain individual liberty, and individual liberty is the value above any
other which a society must embed.
Now these
are two different views of the world, and they’ve become - very harshly - into
focus over the last 20 years.
From
America we are told that the Welfare State constructs dependency,
- that the Welfare State is immoral,
- that the best kind of education is private rather than
State,
- that one shouldn’t actually provide a universal health
system, because people should be incentivised to look after themselves, that
they will become more responsible beings.
And that
view of the world has actually become through the IMF, through the World Bank,
through the pages of our business press and our broadsheets, has bit by bit by
bit become part of the international consensus.
And we in
Europe have been told that our social contracts are actually things that are
burdens. They’re costly, they get
in the way of our competitiveness, they generate unemployment, we should
minimise them, we should follow the American way.
Now even
if it were true, and I’m going to prove that it’s not true, but even if
it were true that European social contracts created all those economic problems
of unemployment and poor productivity - in fact Europe, as I’m going to show is
a high productivity area - even if it were true, the social outcomes that are produced
by that social contract are well worth having.
You
will all know - that for example - life expectancy for men in every European
country is greater than life expectancy in the States for men. Even though the Americans spend
half as much again on their health as we do in Europe, (and) the reason for that is that 42 million Americans don’t have any health
insurance whatsoever.
You’ll
all know in education, that although the top American universities and schools
are absolutely the best in the world without any question, the public schools - the State schools
in America - particularly the State schools in run-down cities, are absolutely
terrible. As a result,
46% of American 18-year-olds, have no vocational or no academic
qualification.
Everywhere in Europe the figure is 10% or lower. We just do things
differently in Europe, and here’s the real killer piece of information which I
didn’t know until I began writing my book:
"If you’re born (on) the
wrong side of the tracks in America
your chances of exiting that are close to negligible."
III
Social mobility in Europe as a result of our commitment to our social
contracts, and our universal education system, is higher than in America. The land of opportunity is Britain,
France, Germany, Italy, Holland. Your chances of moving up in our countries
are much greater than in America, the alleged land of opportunity. The
exit rates from poverty, from the bottom 20% in America are lower than in every
country in the EU. If you’re born (on) the wrong side of the tracks in
America, if you’re brought up in some trailer park, if you’re brought up in some
tenement block, your chances of exiting that are close to negligible.
Meanwhile at the top, those wonderful universities that pay such
fantastic salaries to their academics, are producing a new class of rich who are
becoming self-perpetuating.
If you want to go to Harvard it costs $35,000 just to pay the fees and
accommodation before you actually have your living expenses. That’s about 22,000, 23,000 pounds. The average cost of going to one of the
private universities in the States is about 17,000 pounds a year. Apart from
Harvard and Yale, not one of those universities can provide the loans and the
grants to help students through their university period in the States. As a result, you have to work and making the kind of money you now
have to make to pay those fees and accommodation even before your living
expenses, it is incredibly hard.
It’s best if you come from a rich family. In 1980 you were four times more
likely to get a college degree if you were rich than poor. In the year 2000, ten times
more likely.
I got a note from Bill Gates Senior and Warren Buffet, who are the
two billionaires behind 120 billionaires in America. Having launched the campaign
for responsible taxation, they want to increase inheritance tax, resist any
further cuts in capital gains tax because as Warren Buffet says,
‘The way we’re selecting the next generation of people that top
American society, it's as if we
selected the American Olympic team in 2020 from the sons and daughters of all
those who won Gold Medals in 1996 and 2000.’
I
got a little note from him saying how much he liked my book, believe it or not,
and a draft of a piece on a forthcoming book that he’s co-authored with Bill
Gates, on the case for really
having a big inheritance tax in the States to actually promote social mobility
and opportunity.
The
billionaires understand how much of a grip they’ve got in the upper echelons of
American society, and we in Europe still believe that we somehow are the
continent of class, the continent of privilege, the continent of less
opportunity, the continent of less mobility.
But
because of our social contracts and our insistence of standing by our social
contracts, we are the continent that now offers ordinary men and women the
opportunity that is not offered in America, and that is a tough thing to
say. And when I wrote it,
earlier this year, a lot of right-wing commentators in Britain obviously thought
I needed my head examining, because
that couldn’t be true!
But
the difficulty is that I scoured every piece of data. What there is - and by the way there
should be much more - because there’s a lack of inquiry by American social
scientists into their own country,
and what there is completely supports my thesis. All you could say was that
impressionistically or anecdotally it couldn’t be true.
One of
the arguments used against me was
‘Look at Bill Clinton’ or ‘Look at Jimmy Carter, they came from humble
families and became President of the United States of America’, to which my
counter-reply is ‘Well look at John Major, he came from a humble family and
became Prime Minister of Britain.’ You know, you could always find one person.
One of my great-aunt’s closest friends smoked 50 cigarettes a day and lived till
85. That doesn’t prove that smoking isn’t bad for your health.
But this social contract, our critics say, is actually very bad
for productivity. And you all know the story. Europe is sclerotic, high
unemployment, all the rest of it. It’s lost it’s dynamism.
Here
there is another value system which unites all Europeans, and it comes from the
Catholic church, it comes from socialism, it comes from being a settled
continent for 2,000, 3,000 years. We understand that there are limits to the
degree to which the wealthy and the propertied can declare independence from the
society of which they are part; that they have reciprocal obligations to the
society of which they are part.
We believe, in Europe, that enterprise - it’s brilliant
to have enterprise - and brilliant to have enterprise operating in free markets
- but it’s not a licence to do whatever you want - that actually
organisations, (business organisations), have to live by the same value
system, fairness and justice, (organisational justice), as the wider
society beyond.
Hence we get very ratty about, even in Britain, (which is meant to be
much more like America than France and Germany), we get very ratty about high
levels of executive pay.
- Senior Chief Executives make 450 times the average
blue-collar worker in the States.
- In Britain, the figure’s gone up from 25 times to 40 times
over the last 15 years, and there’s enough complaint about that.
I don’t
believe the people of Britain would countenance the gap that now exists between
Chief Executive pay and blue-collar pay in the States, it would be impossible to
reproduce that in Britain, and correctly so.
Kirsten Garrett: You’re listening to an edited
version of The European Lecture at Cheltenham Literary Festival in Britain in
October. The speaker is former Editor of The Observer, Will Hutton. His latest
book published in England this year, is The World We’re In, and it is, he
says, a declaration of interdependence. One of the pillars of modern society, he
says, is big business
organisations
