Capitalism without capitalists

THE NATIONAL WEALTH

by Dominic Hobson

HarperCollins, L29.99, pp. 1350

Some things are best left to greybearded and thankfully ignored LSE lecturers and clever New York Jews. Radicalism, according to robust AngloSaxon common sense, is one of them. The English have never been much enamoured by exciting thinking, preferring instead the pleasures of shopkeeping -- which is why we exported Tom Paine and decided to import the reassuringly dull Dutch to organise our understated revolution. So last week, when Mr Blair spoke of a `new radicalism', nobody believed that he meant it. New Labour's chatter about the `knowledge economy' and its abusing of hereditary peers is certainly modish, but is not radical. Dominic Hobson, however, is that rare bird, a genuine radical.

In 1995 he wrote with Alan Duncan, the splendid Conservative frontbencher and enthusiastic skier, a furious libertarian, or as they preferred to call it Whiggish, assault on social democratic Britain. Saturn's Children -- titled so because, like that god who devoured his children, the state devours liberty, prosperity and virtue tilted at the errors of modern politics, argued for the legalisation of hard drugs, likened the Inland Revenue to the Gestapo, and generally excited Young Conservatives.

The National Wealth is less polemical than Saturn's Children and more analytical. Mr Hobson performs a useful service. He anatomises the social, financial and economic workings of this country - from the crown to sport to high finance - and tells us who owns it. Yes, this means there are tables, percentages and lists, but thankfully no jargon or number-crunching. Instead, he writes in a lively style with an abundance of anecdote and pithy asides.

He is free of snobbery and the mistyeyed `green and pleasant land' syndrome that mar the thinking of many rightwingers. He actually approves of people who make money. His regard for the aristocracy is not because they symbolise rusticity and the glories of a past Great Britain, but because they are inquiring, cosmopolitan and highly commercial. Furthermore, they are undergoing a renaissance, liberated from the years of socialist economics and contempt for private property:

The modern, business-minded duke or earl is not an abberation, but an authentic representative of the aristocratic tradition. Like everybody else with energy or verve, they simply came out of the closet in the 1980s.

Mr Hobson turns his interest to every aspect of modern Britain: the problem with universities was the democratising of higher education, `the unavoidable outcome of treating young people as citizens (with an equal right to university) rather than consumers'; public schools should turn themselves from pseudo-charities to PLCs; roads should be privatised; the state is castigated for being a milch-cow for producer interests and noisy pressure groups; he concludes there are too many farmers and that their energy is sapped and their imagination is blunted by subsidies; he attacks most professional bodies; he sneers at the notion of a new `cognitive elite' and the paranoia about the death of the job for life and ruthless multinationals; he teaches us to loathe building societies and believes charities to be nationalised industries in all but name.

But his central concern is the way that wealth and its creation have moved from the hands of individuals into those of the institutions, such as PLCs. It is a cause for concern that entrepreneurs wield little power but the salaried rich do. The corporations of modern capitalism are more easily manipulated by governments, and indeed they happily cosy up to the state hence the love affair between Big Business and New Labour. He approvingly quotes Jimmy Goldsmith who saw that Britain was moving towards the dismal position of having capitalism without capitalists. This development, he argues, is unhealthy for the sovereignty of the individual and the success of the market economy.

Ownership is the key to a vigorous economy. `The challenge', he writes, `facing the property-owning democracy is now to tilt the balance of ownership from real estate to financial assets.' He believes that salvation lies in more individuals investing in mutual funds, a device far more popular in the United States than Britain but nonetheless growing in power. These funds help marginalise the power of the anonymous suits and reacquaint people with risktaking and responsibility.

Had Mr Blair wanted to make a radical speech at Bournemouth he should have filleted this book. Mr Hobson's vision of every Briton as a capitalist would see an economy that worked, to borrow Mr Blair's phrase, `for the many, not the few'. The National Wealth would be an excellent primer for New Labour young bucks who want to join the vanguard of the `forces of progress' and detonate the self-serving cliches of what passes for modern political rhetoric. But, as Mr Hobson notes, `democracy makes it exceptionally hard to govern honestly'.

Copyright Spectator Oct 9, 1999
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