Fair is foul

By the time one has waded to page 22 of Them and Us, through what may most politely be described as a stream of consciousness, assailed by random thoughts and plangent expression larded with clichés, one starts to wonder what the point is in going on. We have been told that we ‘ache’ for a ‘compelling, moral, national story’. We have been treated to now-compulsory cries of despair about bankers and their high salaries and bonuses. We have been reminded of some of the expensive things that high- earning people spend their money on. We have met the assertion with disbelief, and the outcry and the reminder with a silent ‘so?’ But then, on page 22, the author calms down, and seeks to tell us what he means by ‘fairness’. It is not a hopeful start. He plunges at once into the warm bath of cliché. ‘Capitalism’, he tells us, ‘walks a tightrope’.

This is an absurd book not because Hutton is wrong about the nature of inequalities in our society and the supposed remedy for them — though he is that too — but because he appears to have the thought processes one normally associates with those who require some sort of counselling. Having hinted that he is going to define fairness, he doesn’t. He merely says that it — whatever ‘it’ is — is essential if capitalism is going to stay on its ‘tightrope’. Hutton is good, as another cliché used to have it, at making a drama out of a crisis. He warns of ‘elites who want to use rigged and manipulated profits to sustain their status and position’, which would cause capitalism’s ‘degrading into racketeering, exploitation and speculation’.