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- [00:00]
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- [02:15]
Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. On today's episode, Jeremy Hunt shares his vision of how we can achieve economic renewal in Britain. Hunt joined us live on stage in October for the final installment of this year's Intelligence Economic Outlook series. The former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary and Health Secretary reflected on his political tenure and drew on the themes of his new book, Can We Be Great Again? To share his vision of how we can achieve economic renewal in Britain. While candid about Britain's weaknesses, he argued that on issues ranging from European security to global trade and climate, migration and the future of democracy, the UK still has the potential to lead if it chooses to act Like a country that matters. The Intelligence Squared Economic Outlook series is made in partnership with Guinness Global Investors. For those who don't know, Guinness Global Investors is an independent British fund manager that helps both individuals and institutions harness the drivers of future growth to achieve their investment goals. Now, let's join our host, BBC news presenter Johnny diamond, with more.
- [03:30]
Johnny Diamond
Thank you. Thank you very much, Hannah. I'll very briefly introduce a man you've come through the rain to see, so you probably know exactly who he is. Anyways, Jeremy Hunt obviously was Chancellor of the exchequer between 2022 and 2024 and before that gained an unrivalled view of government as Foreign Secretary. Health Secretary, was it? Six years as Health Secretary, I'm sure you have the scars on your back. And Culture Secretary, during the London Olympics, there is a vote that you are able to participate in and we would encourage you to, once you see the QR Code, to be polled on your view on the UK economy. You can see the QR Code now. The point is that we poll you now and then we will do the same in about an hour and a half once Jeremy has persuaded you of the bright sunlit uplands to come. But please do, and we will read out the results once we have those at the end of the evening, both the before and the after, I should add. You can probably see the book in front of me here. Jeremy has a book out at the moment. Can We Be Great again? It has the benefit of being both very useful analysis, but also full of great stories and very well written. And he will be signing copies of that afterwards. I can't encourage you enough to take a look. Can we start with the book? I mean, the title is provocative, particularly against the background of almost French levels of pessimism. Two thirds of the UK population now think, as you say in your book, that the country is in decline. A third of young people would like to live somewhere else. Many think that we are being eclipsed or have been eclipsed on the global stage. Can we talk first of all about what you mean by great, and then move on to the chances of being great again?
- [05:25]
Jeremy Hunt
Absolutely. And good evening. And I'm delighted that actually, for the first time I can remember in a book talk, lots of people have got a glass of wine, which is exactly the right attitude. I do want to make you a bit more optimistic tonight, but not necessarily over the next four years. That's quite a random period of time to choose. But this is the book that I wish I had been given on the day that I became foreign Secretary. And if that happens to you, it is quite an out of body experience because obviously you meet the Prime Minister. It happened to me in 2018, July 2018, on a Monday evening, and then you get shown to your office in Whitehall and it is by far the grandest office in Whitehall. It's not much smaller than this room, it's three times bigger than the Prime Minister's room. It's absolutely beautiful. And it's, you know, clearly designed to impress Johnny Foreigner as opposed to Johnny diamond. And it's meant to be. It's been doing that for sort of 200 years. And I think the same thought crosses every new Foreign Secretary's mind. I'm certain that Yvette Cooper thought exactly the same when she became Foreign Secretary a month ago. And that is, is this all an imperial delusion? Are we kidding ourselves about our role in the world? And I thought when I stopped doing the job, I'm going to do some research, I'm going to write a book to actually answer that question. And my definition of great, Johnny, I don't think Donald Trump should have a monopoly on the word great. That's the first thing. My definition of great is a country that can shape the world as well as be shaped by it. And what I do in the book is I take the seven or eight biggest challenges the world faces, from the future of democracy to security in Europe to climate change to the migration crisis, all these problems, and then I say, what role or influence do the experts say Britain has when it comes to resolving these issues? And in every single case, out of 193 countries in the United nations, they always say we are one of the top 10 most influential countries, often one of the top five. So I think that, you know, nothing can be taken for granted. But I do think that we have fallen into a big trap of losing perspective when we absorb ourselves in our own problems, which are huge. And that is to forget that other people have big problems as well. We're all. And my argument, I'd make the same argument, by the way, if it was an audience of Aussies or an audience of French or an audience of, of Germans or Japanese. It's not that, you know, our country is better than other countries, it is just that the world is so dangerous right now. The worst thing we can do is actually underestimate our influence. Far better to roll up our sleeves and try and sort out the problems as best we can.
- [08:42]
Johnny Diamond
You clearly believe that the country has something to give, that it has a useful leadership role beyond the sort of self importance of the political class, the civil service, etc, etc. It's not just about being at top table.
- [08:59]
Jeremy Hunt
Yeah. I mean, you just look in a European context. We have the biggest and most respected military in Europe, the most respected universities in Europe, the biggest tech sector in Europe independently rated as having more soft power than any other European country, and along with the French, the most hard power of any European country. And so just in this continent we have a lot of influence, but then when it comes to climate change, we've, We've probably done. I mean, I think we're ranked third globally behind, I think the Netherlands and Denmark when it comes to the quality of governance. We're also ranked by another think tank as third globally behind Germany and Australia, believe it or not. And this is not to minimize the problems we have. I think the big. The elephant in the room. So I wrote, basically I wrote half the book after Boris didn't want me to carry on putting it nicely as Foreign Secretary. And so I went to the backbenches and I started doing my research and then I rather unexpectedly became Chancellor. And so I had to stop writing. And I got back, I finished it after the election defeat last year, and having been Chancellor, I had to write a slightly different book, which is how on earth are you going to pay for it? And so I do go into that in quite a lot of detail. But, you know, there is an iron link between economic strength and political clout. And how do we fare on that? Again, not as bad as everyone thinks. We're the sixth largest economy in the world. And what do the center for Economics and Business Research say we will be in the rankings in 15 years time, in 2039, they say we will still be the sixth largest economy in the world. In fact, we'll have closed the gap slightly with Japan and Germany. So I think even when it comes to our economic woes, of which there are many, and I'm sure we'll discuss those, we shouldn't underestimate our strengths. I think we've got a lot to bring to the table.
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Johnny Diamond
Can we talk about the unexpected, Chancellor? Because there's a great tale about the unexpectedness of it all. We're What? I mean, 20 days into the Truss administration, something like that, things are clearly going horribly wrong. The markets are starting to sort of fall apart and you get a phone call.
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Jeremy Hunt
Yes, I was, you know, I was enjoying being on the backbenches action. I went for a weekend in Brussels with my wife Lucia, and we woke up in a lovely hotel in the Old Quarter. On a Friday morning, and Lucia was cleaning her teeth. And I looked at my phone and there was a message saying, liz Truss here, please call. And I shouted out to Lucia, I can't believe those idiot journalists. Apologies, Johnny, that think I'm such a sucker I'm going to fall for a hoax like this. I didn't think in a million years she would want to call me, so I ignored it. And then the phone rang and it was an unrecognized number, and I ignored that and we went down and had a lovely breakfast. And then finally a friend called me and said, look, I think number 10 really are trying to get in touch with you. So I very gingerly called the number 10 switchboard and said, look, I think this is a hoax. But I. I thought I got a message saying the Prime Minister wanted to speak to me. Oh, yes, she does, she does. And, and, and the rest is history. So it very nearly didn't happen, but it did.
- [12:29]
Johnny Diamond
Did you have any hesitation about saying yes?
- [12:33]
Jeremy Hunt
I've been around the block quite a bit. You know, I've been in the Cabinet for the most of the previous decade and, and this job, there were a few. There were some hesitations in my mind. The first thing was I didn't think Liz Truss was going to last very long, so I thought it was quite possible I would be the. The shortest serving Chancellor in history was a cause for hesitation. And then I thought, when you're offered a job by the Prime Minister, your maximum moment of leverage is before you accept. So I did think, you know, what should I ask for in return? But I knew things were such a mess, there wasn't really anything I could ask for, so I actually, I didn't. So I just said to her, look, can I have half an hour to talk about it with my family? Because it's a big. A big thing. And I wanted to make sure, you know, I promised Lucia for the whole of that six years I was Health Secretary, this would be my last job. And then we were going to, you know, have a life of blissful calm. And I mean, you know, that was pretty intense with things like the junior doctors strike. So I did want to make sure she was on board, but she was absolutely all in. So I actually called back after 20 minutes and accepted it.
- [13:51]
Johnny Diamond
And it was your understanding that you would have effective carte blanche?
- [13:56]
Jeremy Hunt
Yes. I mean, I think Liz Truss knew that she had to stabilize the markets at that point, and to her credit, she went along with absolutely everything that I asked her to do. I mean, she sat next to me in the House of Commons, as I basically tore up the entire manifesto with which she had been elected. And so that was a. That must have been a very difficult thing for her to do. But it was also quite interesting for me to see how the British state works. This was not a good moment for UK PLC after the Mini Budget, and it was obviously not our finest hour. But I think if you'd been a fly on the wall in the treasury and you'd seen the meetings that I had with treasury officials, you'd have been curiously encouraged. Actually, they are phenomenally clever treasury officials. The discussions we had were very, very open. I had no background in the City or financial markets, and there was total honesty from me about what I knew and what I didn't know. And every Chancellor that I've met, every former Chancellor I've met, says the same thing, that they think treasury officials are absolutely brilliant. That's not to say the institution doesn't need reforming in some quite big ways. I think that the lesson I draw from that incident is that the British state is actually surprisingly good at tackling really difficult issues in a crisis. But if you compare what I did, I, by the way, I had a black hole of, as you know, we're probably going to talk about black holes. It's a phrase. It's become a bit of a phrase, hasn't it? Well, I had a black hole of 72 billion that I had to deal with. It was a real one, by the way. And I sometimes think, what's the difference between me and Rachel, politics aside? And I think the truth is that when I became Chancellor, everyone knew there was a big emergency. And so I kind of had permission to do some, to think the unthinkable, to do absolutely huge things. I think the difficulty for Rachel is that it's a much more slow burn crisis. She's been in office a year. It's much, much harder to make changes in that set of circumstances. I think the challenge, if you're trying to say, how do we do things better as a country, we need to find a way of being better at solving big problems when we're not in a crisis and we're not being forced to.
- [16:40]
Johnny Diamond
You were not the shortest serving Chancellor of all time. You were kept on by Rishi Sunak and you spent a good two years at the Treasury. Looking back, what were the things that you were most proud of? What were the things or was the thing that you wished you had done, either unable or unwilling to do?
- [17:03]
Jeremy Hunt
Well, I think probably the biggest Thing that people will remember about that period is that I arrived and there was a huge crisis. Inflation was 11%. And I had to go through a series of, take some really horrible decisions to get things back into balance. And, you know, I had a lot of support. I had to work very closely with not just treasury officials, but with the bank of England, with first Liz Truss, then Rishi Sunak. So it wasn't just me. If I look back and I say what was the big thing that I wished I'd done that I didn't do? I think it's probably welfare reform. I mean, I actually did do with Mel Stride, who was the DWP secretary. We did do a lot of. And we had a big program in place, but it was getting close to the end of the Parliament. But I think now this is the make or break issue for the British economy because we're now signing off about 5,000 people onto sickness benefit every day, and about 1,000 people, we are saying not just you don't have to work, but you don't even have to look for work. Now, at the same time as that we are, you know, we've got an aging population, more and more older people. It is absolutely crazy. And these people, the majority of them have mental illness, anxiety or depression. And every doctor I ever met when I was health secretary said that if you've got anxiety or depression, the thing you need is social contact. And we are actually taking them out of the labor market. They are losing social contact. Their anxiety and depression is getting worse, and we can't afford to do it and at a fraction of the price. I mean, if we, and this is, by the way, something that has really gone wrong since and partly because of the pandemic. So the welfare rolls and the cost of the welfare bill was actually steadily falling until 2019. But something went badly wrong in the pandemic. And with the benefit of hindsight, that is something which I wish I had really got going on much sooner because I think, and I'm not planning, not proposing to be party political at all unless your questions are really nasty, Johnny. But, but I think the. I will say this. I think the problem with the, with Rachel's 22 billion black hole, irrespective of whether it was true or not. And I think, you know, ask the Office of Budget responsibilities to get the best answer on that. But the problem was it deflected us away from the big argument we needed to be having, the big debate we needed to have, which was about the welfare state and the fact that it's gone badly wrong and the fact that it needs reforming and that I think, and I know Rachel wants to do that now and she's had her setbacks with the winter fuel allowance and the 5 billion of welfare cuts. I really, really hope she comes back to this, because if she doesn't, it's not just going to be two successive budgets of tax rises, it's going to be five budgets of tax rises. And then it's just going to be incredibly difficult for the economy to grow. And that, I think is the big, big thing.
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- [22:08]
Johnny Diamond
I want to tuck into some of the issues that you bring up in your book. Can we start with technology? There's quite a lot in your book about it and you mentioned it before. You argue that Britain has the potential to be. Let's reach for a cliche. The next Silicon Valley. Why do you think the UK is so well placed?
- [22:29]
Jeremy Hunt
Well, it's interesting you call it a cliche. I'm quite chuffed that you call it a cliche, Johnny, because no one had ever said that before until I said it. And that suggests that it's being said rather a lot. But let me just. Because it's a really interesting story. Sorry. I think it's an interesting story. You must be the judge. You're the audience. But in my first autumn statement, when I had that 72 billion black hole on the Monday before, it was on a Wednesday, the statement, and on the Monday before, William Haigh wrote his column in the Times. And everyone was really worried about what I was going to say and what taxes are going to be increased and what spending was going to be cut. And he said, I hope Jeremy Hunt will give people hope. And I thought, yeah, what can I do? And then I looked through and I decided, I looked for the section on growth and I said, I'm going to say that our opportunity is in technology and we can be the world's next Silicon Valley. And no one had said it before, and I was fully expected to be laughed at by all and sundry, and I wasn't. And it was really interesting. And the reason I wasn't, not least I wasn't by the British tech sector, and I'm sure there are lots of people from that sector here tonight. But the reason is because after the US and China, we have the third largest tech ecosystem in the world, only the third in the world to be worth more than a trillion dollars. We have more unicorns than France and Germany put together, more venture capital funding. But it isn't just that. We have some competitive advantages that make it really hard for other people who are trying to muscle in on the AI boom to do so, particularly the French, who are very, very focused under President Macron in trying to do more in the AI space. And the reason is because outside the US we have the most respected universities, and outside the US we have the biggest financial services sector. And if you're trying to nurture the unicorns of the future, and at the moment, our problem is that when they get to a decent size, they go across to NASDAQ for their listing. And that's something which both Rachel and I are trying to, have been trying to address in various measures. But there has been this, and this is, look, if I was going to make you optimistic about the future, I'm not, as I say, four years is a little bit of a short time span. But let me just tell you one thing that I think is really extraordinary that no one talks about, and that is a revolution. It is an Absolute revolution that's happened in Britain in the last decade and that is that our leading universities have now got science parks and tech parks. They are nurturing spinouts in a way that's never happened before and only used to happen at Stamford and the Ivy Leagues. And if you go to the science parks at Cambridge or the tech park at Oxford, it's absolutely imperial. But it's also Edinburgh, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield. It's incredible what is happening. And that's why I think if I was, you know, my son is 15, I've got 11 year old and a 13 year old daughter and if I was saying to them, how we going to pay our way when you're my age and over the next, over the decades ahead, I would say that we do have real strengths in this country in the industries like life sciences, technology, creative industries, defense, which are going to be the ones that grow in the decades ahead.
- [26:27]
Johnny Diamond
Let's get back to the gloomy stuff in particular.
- [26:29]
Jeremy Hunt
I wouldn't take him long, would it? You see there we are, a BBC journalist. Go on, Johnny, go on.
- [26:35]
Johnny Diamond
In particular, what's being called the productivity puzzle in the uk and that is the struggle to raise the level of productivity. And one of the reasons that productivity overall is so low is because public sector productivity acts as a drag on productivity generally. I mean, it's thought to be around a growth of about 0.9%. You've written raise that to 2% and something magical happens. How do you raise productivity in the public sector in particular? I suppose in parts of it which are so labor intensive by their very nature that they struggle with issues like robotics and automation.
- [27:15]
Jeremy Hunt
Well, there are three letters that answer your question very precisely, Johnny. Nhs. And that is because in, I mean, first of all, as we're trying to be positive tonight, aren't we everyone? So, yeah, we are trying to be positive. Okay, so here's the positive thing on productivity. The state in this country controls is directly responsible for a quarter of our output. So we have this historic productivity problem, which there are various reasons why some of it's a little bit overstated because we have much more of a services sector than a manufacturing sector sector and have for most of our lifetimes. And manufacturing tends to show up in higher productivity numbers, but some of it is real. But the government controls a quarter of our output. So Rachel Reeves has the power theoretically to sort out a quarter of our productivity problem. And around half of that quarter is the nhs. And the NHS is the most wonderful healthcare system in the world and the most inefficient and it is unbelievably inefficient. And I say that with, frankly, with an element of guilt, because I was Health secretary for six years and I focused on lots of things. But there was one really big thing that I didn't do, because I didn't come to understand it was the root cause of the problem until the very end. So the NHS is the most micromanaged healthcare system in the world. It's the biggest in the world. It's the fifth largest employer in the world. There's only four organizations that employ more people than the NHS, which is the US army, the Chinese Army, McDonald's and Walmart. And then it's the NHS, the biggest in Europe by a long way. And despite it being the biggest, it is micromanaged ruthlessly from the center by NHS England and the Department of Health. So if you run a hospital, you have 18 monthly operational targets, you know, A and E waiting times, cancer waiting times, elective care waiting times, and they're monthly, and the numbers are reported back. And your job depends on making progress on those targets. So you're constantly looking over your shoulder to your manager at NHS England, on whom your career depends. It is not like that if you ran a hospital in France or Germany or America. And the unintended consequence of this is just as happened with Stalin in Russia, those tractor factories are incredibly inefficient, because the sort of boring but essential things that are happening in a French hospital or a German hospital or a Swiss hospital, like putting in a proper IT system, tackling waste, those things just don't happen because everyone is frantically trying to get next year's numbers, next month's numbers to move in the right direction. So I should have scrapped all those national targets, that they are awful. And I've had this conversation with Wares. Unfortunately, every Prime Minister, no matter what the party tells every new Health secretary the same three words get a grip. And when the health sector is told to get a grip, that means more targets, not less targets. And this is the problem. And every Health secretary thinks they're going to be the one that turns it around, and they aren't. So now I want to be positive, please. We have actually done this very thing in another sector, and that is our state schools. Our state schools over the last three decades have risen in England, sadly, not in Scotland and Wales, to be some of the very best in the world. And our reading standards are now the highest in Western Europe. Our maths is behind only sort of Korea, Taiwan, Shanghai, Japan, We've done so well in our state and we've done it because we give heads their budgets, we tell them, you're going to have your Ofsted report, we're going to publish your exam results, but the rest is up to you. And the result is they innovate. And we have these marvelous academy chains and we have seen extraordinary things. And when was the last time you went into a state school and saw any waste at all? They are really parsimonious with how they spend money because, you know, every penny counts and they are responsible for it and they can find good ways to use it. So that's the model that we need to adopt in health. I started by introducing a kind of Ofsted system through the CQC into the nhs. I didn't finish. That's how you improve public sector productivity by devolving power down and allowing people who make savings to keep those savings locally so they can improve the services that they offer. And then we get a more efficient nhs. Is there.
- [32:31]
Johnny Diamond
I mean, as I said, you know, you have a pretty much unparalleled view of government because you have held such sort of big offices over such a long period of time. Do you sense a structural problem of an inability to take the kind of long term decisions driven by the political cycle, driven by the media cycle? Did you sense that then? Do you sense it now?
- [32:56]
Jeremy Hunt
I think there are some things that, you know, if we want to be better at long term decisions in this country, there are some things that we need to change. I don't think it's about the individuals because I think civil servants generally work really hard and are very decent people and they have a very strong. I mean, I never came across this sort of Sir Humphrey cliche where they were trying to frustrate me behind my back. I think they have a very strong sense of being in a democracy where the final decision, decision has to be taken by someone who's elected. But there are, I think, one or two issues. One of them is that I talk about the NHS being micromanaged. Well, the treasury micromanages the rest of Whitehall in the same way. So, for example, if you're in the Department of Education or the Department of, or DEFRA or any government department, and you've got some money, the financial year ends at the end of March and you've got some money that you haven't spent at the end of March, the Treasury takes it back. And this is very helpful for Chancellors because there's usually, you know, 5 or 6 billion at the End of every year that hasn't been spent, by the way, that's not very much money in the grander scheme of things, because we spend about a trillion pounds each year. But 5 or 6 billion can be helpful and you get it back as a Chancellor and you like that. But what that means is that over in defra, or the Department for Education or the Department for Health or Department for Transport come January, you are desperately trying to get money out of the door to stop the treasury getting it back and it's incredibly wasteful. So we need to stop that. And the other thing that I think is that doesn't work in quite the right way it should, is that when you're a Cabinet minister, I mean, it was really interesting to me. The only bit of every government department that works 24, seven, including weekends, is the media department. And they are. They work so hard. My God, if you've worked in the media department of the, you know, Department of Health and then you go off and work for a FTSE 100 company, it's like a walk in the park. I mean, you know, you get this Chief executive who's all stressed out about their results coming out, and these Department of Health guys go, for God's sake, what are you worrying about? This is nothing. Health Secretary is getting in the neck every single day of every single, Every single morning the media comes out throughout the year. And so this, Those guys work really hard. But unfortunately, it's also a sense of where the government's priorities are, because this isn't the units that are actually changing the country for the better, these are the people who are managing the media. And I think that there's too much worry about things going wrong. And as a Cabinet minister, one or two things go wrong and that can be the end of your career. And so you really worry about the media and that's reflected in your very well staffed media department. But somehow we don't have the same priority going to whether you're actually changing things for the public for the better. And that really boils down to a Prime Minister showing leadership and saying, look, if something goes wrong in the media, I'm not going to come down on you like a ton of bricks if you are changing things for the better, for the public, because that's the thing that needs to matter the most.
- [36:35]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was created in partnership with Guinness Global Investors. It was produced by Hannah Kaye and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For more information on Guinness Global Investors, just head to guinnessgi.com or see the link in the episode description you've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [37:12]
Jeremy Hunt
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