In the original dustsheet. Maroon cloth binding with silver title on the spine.

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Will Hutton, the Guardian’s Economics Editor, is the most respected analyst writing in Britain today. He argues that the weakness of the economy can’t be divorced from the problems of the rest of society. This is a root and branch, total critique of our institutions. We have an eighteenth century state doing a twentieth century job. Our business doesn’t get the investment it needs because of the City’s stranglehold on the economy. The cult of the Gentleman is killing creativity. Parliament doesn’t get the people’s respect because it is unreformed; the government of the revolutionary Margaret Thatcher got lost; the opposition is crippled by its own conservatism. Hutton has uncomfortable explanations for the attitudes that prevent us moving forward into the twenty-first century as a truly modern country. Essential reading.

Review: This is a very interesting book.

Full of very good ideas.

This was essentially New Labour’s economic manifesto for the 1997 election that they won partly on the strength of this.

It was not implemented.

If it had been we may not have been where we are now.

I am going to read it again and then try to find out what actually happened and why.

William Nicolas Hutton (born 21 May 1950) is a British journalist. As of 2022, he writes a regular column for The Observer, co-chairs the Purposeful Company, and is the president-designate of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is the chair of the advisory board of the UK National Youth Corps. He was principal of Hertford College, University of Oxford from 2011 to 2020, and co-founder of the Big Innovation Centre, an initiative from the Work Foundation (formerly the Industrial Society), having been chief executive of the Work Foundation from 2000 to 2008. He was formerly editor-in-chief for The Observer.