Book review: Hunt contends that Britain can indeed be Great again

Can We Be Great Again? by Jeremy Hunt

In Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural address, delivered on 4th March 1933 and heard on radios across America, he opened with platitudes about how the country must deal with the economic crisis, which had started with the Wall Street Crash in October 1929. But he went on to coin a phrase which has entered the English language:

“This is a day of national consecration, and I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the presidency I will address them with a candour and a decision which the present situation of our nation impels.

“This is pre-eminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.

“So first of all let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That too is Jeremy Hunt’s message. We have talked ourselves into believing we are in decline. Many think Britain is finished as a serious player on the world stage.

Hunt argues that this is nonsense. In nine chapters he points out our strengths in various fields, including defence, diplomacy, medicine, education, innovation, finance and AI.

He sometimes becomes, like FDR, platitudinous. But he recognises the danger, and tries to evade it by starting most of his chapters with several pages of biography. We gain insights not only into Hunt himself, but into such figures as David Maxwell Fyfe (author of the European Convention on Human Rights), James Lovelock, Masataka Okuma (the Japanese businessman who realised Britain would be a good place for a Nissan factory) and Demis Hassabis (pioneer of AI at DeepMind):

“amidst…fierce competition, the UK has two things many of its competitors can only dream of: highly respected universities and a large financial services sector. It has more AI graduates than anywhere else in Europe. That means the talent pipeline from both UK students and international students studying in the UK is extremely strong. And when it comes to financing new start-ups, Britain has the world’s second largest financial services sector, meaning there is a lot of capital to tap into. With pension fund reform there will be even more.”

Hunt is convinced that Britain can be the next Silicon Valley. This will require, among other things, public investment in universities, life science research and defence. Where is the money to come from?

His next book will be about economics, but in this one he points out that welfare reform and public sector efficiency “offer enormous potential for savings”.

Productivity in the public sector is growing “by a measly long-term average of 0.9 per cent”. Raise that to two per cent, and “something magical” happens: debt stops rising, higher investment is possible, and so are tax cuts.

At the end of the book, Hunt exhorts Sir Keir Starmer “to be as bold as the Attlee or Thatcher governments”, and to take “radical decisions on welfare reform and public sector productivity”.

As Roy Lilley has pointed out, the present doctors’ dispute should not be seen simply as a battle about pay. It should be reframed so it becomes about how to retain doctors and reduce the use of locums.

The loss from the NHS of staff who have been trained for years at enormous expense, and the plugging of gaps with locums, are immensely costly. Higher productivity (dismal term) cannot be attained simply by defeating the irresponsible agitators in the British Medical Association. The aim must be to build a profession in which good people want to stay.

While Hunt’s book was going to press, Starmer’s first attempt at welfare reform was defeated by his own MPs. Michael Crick has chronicled the great efforts Labour made before the general election to ensure the selection of subservient candidates.

They have turned out to be subservient to the received wisdom that whatever misfortunes one suffers in life, one is entitled to full financial compensation from the British state.

This principle commanded almost universal assent during the recent pandemic, and has since encouraged a rapid increase in the payment of invalidity benefits, with the result that the British state is heading for bankruptcy.

As an MP, one is presented with many cases of undeserved misfortune, in the face of which it seems both hard-hearted and impolitic to contend that nothing can be done.

Hunt’s hope that for the country’s sake, Starmer would be bold in reforming welfare has already been disappointed. Nor do the prospects for public-sector productivity look encouraging.

It turns out that one cannot do these difficult things unless, as Henry Hill observed yesterday on ConHome with reference to public-sector strikes, one has thought through how one is going to do them.

Hunt relates at the start of his book that on 14th October 2022 he woke up in a comfortable Brussels hotel, where he had gone for a weekend break with his wife, and received a message from an unknown number on his mobile phone: “Please can you give me a call. Liz Truss here.”

He assumed this was a hoax call from a radio show host, and ignored it, but by the time he finished breakfast he had received two more messages to the same effect.

He found a number he had already had in his phone for the No 10 switchboard, rang it, explained to the operator it was probably a hoax but he’d had a message that the PM wished to talk to him, was told she did indeed wish to talk to him, and a few seconds later was put through to her.

She asked him to become Chancellor. He took 20 minutes to think it over and accepted. Kwasi Kwarteng had just been sacked and Hunt set about dealing with a £72 billion budget deficit, which in under a week became a £10 billion surplus.

Six days after Hunt’s appointment, on the morning of 20th October, Truss presented him with two options as far as her own future was concerned: she could announce her resignation, but remain in office during a four-week leadership contest, or she could hang on for six months at the head of a “unity Cabinet” and “see where we’ve got to in the summer”.

Hunt told her if she was going to resign “it’s in the national interest that you do it quickly, because otherwise the markets will collapse”. Five days later Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, and kept Hunt on as Chancellor.

These events, often touched on to remind us what a hash the Conservatives made of things, also illustrate the more encouraging point that in a crisis, the British state is capable of reacting at great speed.

The reaction is more likely to be the right one if much thought has already been directed to what ought to be done. Even then, history suggests, we usually have to make three or four attempts at any great reform before accomplishing it.

But in many respects we are in a better frame of mind than we were half a century ago, when our governing class was oppressed by the humiliation of Suez, and the palpable inferiority of British Leyland.

Hunt’s last book, ZERO: Eliminating unnecessary deaths in a post-pandemic NHS, received a rather disparaging review on ConHome. This one is a distinct improvement.

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