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LSE: Public lectures and events
How Good We Can Be: ending the mercenary society and building a great country
01:22:02
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A
Good evening, everybody, and welcome to the lse. Those of you who've come from outside the lse, my name's John Hills. I'm from the Department of Social Policy here at LSE and from our Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion. Like many of you in the audience, I suspect not all actually looking at the age range. I first came across Will through his column in the Guardian newspaper, a column which was the inspiration for and I think contributed a lot to his hugely successful 1995 book, the State we're in, which was a best seller. It may be that you knew him, you first came across him as editor in Chief of the observer newspaper, or through his continuing the columns he continues to write each week. Or you might have come across him through his fairly recent book on China, the Writing on the Wall, or on Them and Us, or as Chief Executive of the Work foundation, or now as Chair of the Big Innovation Centre, or possibly even as Principal of Hertford College, Oxford. Now, I list all of those, not just to emphasise Will's glittering career, but also to give a partial explanation of how he's been able to write the book that he's introducing, indeed launching tonight. And I say tonight advisedly, because this book is published at midnight, I think, so you are getting a sneak preview of this and the copies on sale are therefore effectively advance copies. His scope is huge in this book. He talks about the Constitution, he talks about financial markets and company structure and the effects and the causes of the crisis. He talks about innovation and technological change, he talks about the media, he talks about inequality and he talks about the nature of work, all of which have been themes through his career. So I think there are few other people who could and possibly would have dared to write with such a scope. Now, I should say that it would be very good. If you have got a mobile phone, if you are going to tweet, please could you turn it to silent. If you are going to tweet, please use the hashtag lsegood. If you think that the LSE is good, please fill in the National Student survey, but do that separately, but otherwise, please do put your phones on silent or off. This evening's event is being recorded and as long as the quality works out, it will be made more widely available to an international audience. Will is going to talk for 30 to 40 minutes about what's in the book and after that there'll be an opportunity for you all to put questions to him. And then after that, when we stop, Will will be signing copies of the book up here. I Think they'll bring them up here, they're on sale outside, but they'll be brought up here for the signing. But there's also going to be a reception outside in the atrium which is just round to the left. So could you all join me in welcoming tonight's speaker, Will Hutton, the author of How Good We Can Be, Ending the Mercenary Society and Building a Great Country.
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B
Thank you very much Indeed. It was 20 years ago, not today, but nearly today, that I launched the State we're in. And actually very early on I spoke at the LSE and it's great to be 20, to be kind of back 20 years on. Actually I have had one or two kind of other appearances here in their 20 years since 1995. Of course the kind is richer than it was 20 years ago. I didn't anticipate the Internet, I didn't anticipate quite as much kind of transformation. But some things I was worried about 20 years ago are even more marked now. In fact, when I look at the State we're in, which was quite a popular book, I mean it was one of the better selling economics books since 1945, second best selling economics book since 1945. And you know, one of the things I, when I look at some of the things that I'm concerned about now, I feel a bit like Mary A Little Lamb really. I was kind of, it was meant to be a big radical book from this man in the center left setting out kind of a vision of stakeholder capitalism and a kind of new vision for Britain. And I was worried about, and I thought it was dreadful that there'd been 1 million council house sales and not replaced and here we are now 5 million is the cumulative total. I was really worried about inequality and the levels of executive pay, which I thought was an astonishing 60 times median pay, I mean now 140 times and every polarity on which you look. I coined this notion of the 30, 30, 40 society. I was very worried about the growth of temporary work. I never anticipated what, 1.4 million zero hour contracts, 1.7 million agency workers. I was concerned about too much takeover. I was concerned about the financialization of our companies. I was concerned about the inequalities over and above income and wealth inequality in our country. And I was really, I thought the financial system was running amok and it could end in tears. I never anticipated the banking system could virtually collapse. I thought there were that the degree of centralization of the polity was going to lead to all kinds of tensions. But I could never have believed that actually our country could have got so close to the secession of Scotland as it got. If you read the opening paragraphs, I also kind of do a little requiem for Britain's great power status, but I still thought the armed services were pretty damn good, whatever you may think, and I think most people in this room will share the view that the, the interventions in Iraq certainly were not legitimate and Afghanistan was a monumental waste of £40 billion. But the bigger point is that the military reverses in both places. We actually didn't win either. We were bailed out in Basra by the Americans and we started off in Helmand with 700 paratroopers, ultimately bailed out of that by 25,000 NATO troops. I mean leave aside the rights and wrongs of it. That isn't, you know, we're used, you know, the notion is, you know, we may complain, all of us about the country, but there's this in the back of your mind. You carry the view the country is notwithstanding a great power and actually militarily we can do stuff, we can't even do that in 2015. So I mean many things that I was concerned about 20 years ago in my view are more marked. And we have an astonishing trade deficit, the tax base has dissolved, productivity is deeply moderate, well behind where you might expect it to be. And I think there's, you know, you find centre right commentators writing about the decline of the middle class, the squeeze of the middle class as much as centre left commentators worrying about the disintegration of the working class. The kind of solidarities and neighborhoods and communities have dissolved. We're all living kind of atomistic lives fearful of foreigners. Again I'm astonished by, I mean there was a fair amount of Euroscepticism 20 years ago, but it's kind of morphed into a deep distrust of the foreigner, a willingness to blame foreigners for our ills, which again I suppose am I being romantic, I think that's, I don't recognize in a conception of fair minded Britishness kind of some of the dreadful things that are said about kind of the non British. I defy anyone and I had lots of centre right critics when I wrote the State Run. I defy anyone to argue the last 20 years could not have been improved upon at its mildest. And actually to have lived through as we have in the last six or seven years, you know, the collapse of the banking system saved only by 1 trillion pound intervention, the breakup of the country narrowly avoided and still could happen, and islands that actually separate all around the world. I mean, I don't think it'd be good for Scotland or for England if the Scots vote for independence. But I understand why that runs so strong in Scotland for Scots members of the audiences and the kind of story on inequality. I mean actually if you're in your early, late teens, early 20s, the notion of acquiring skills, a profession, building a career over time in organizations that are likely to endure for you to live a life that you have reason to value, to actually start a family, buy a house, buy a flat, all of that is becoming elusive unless you have the bank of Mum and Dad behind you. These are not great times for our country. And I certainly don't believe that the kind of political discourse 90 days before a general election kind of measures to, or measures up to the profundity of the crisis confronting the country. Now having said that, I immediately want to say, and that's why I've called the book not the Selling off of Britain or the Vandals within or all kinds of titles I played with, but actually how good we can be because actually notwithstanding all these mistakes, there's quite a lot of good on which if the right kind of policy framework and right institutional framework, right incentives were put in place, right governing structures, I think over a 15 year period, the country could become the most dynamic in Europe and many of these problems could actually slough away quite rapidly. We are the best adopters of the Internet and digitalization in Europe. There is a newfound entrepreneurialism, fantastic startups. John mentioned Oxford, where I lead or work in Hartford College. The greatest number of life science startups outside the United States is actually in the 25 mile travel to work area of Oxford. Cambridge has its comparable strengths, London has those strengths. Times 10. Just what's happening up around King's Cross is extraordinary. It would be wrong to kind of just say, you know, the place is a kind of a wasteland. There are great companies, many multinationals have their headquarters here, although that's threatened by potentially leaving the European Union fabulous universities of which this is one London University, taken in its entirety, obviously stronger than Oxford and Cambridge and I speak as a representative of Oxford. So there's a lot to build on, a lot to build on. But actually, and if you are a member of the Centre Right consensus, believing in the conservatives long term economic plan, which they parrot every time they get to the microphone, you say what Will Hutton has said is evidence that actually we don't want to stick to it. The overweening priority is to reduce the deficit. Everything else must be consecrated to that end, to which I would argue, really, is it that good? Have the things I said in my opening remarks not happened? And I think it's all the more kind of elusive because I do think that we are living and here I just want to carry on with this optimistic note before I try and set out what I think we can do. I do think that it's worth saying what a kind of moment of possibility this is, not just for Britain, but actually for all industrial societies, advanced industrial societies, general purpose technologies are technologies that change the world. The transformative technologies that actually have applications well beyond the area in which they're developed and multiple spillover effects generate wealth and productivity, change the possibilities of life. The computer is obviously one of them. Not just a communications kind of tool, but transformative impact of digitalization that's driven by that. Robotization is another. The aeroplane in its time was another. The three masted sailing ship in its time was another. The railway in its time was another. There were eight of these great technologies. Nine. If you want to include the kind of lean production in the 20th century, in the 21st century, we're expecting the theorists on innovation that to be doubled. So there'll be more of these transformative technologies in the next hundred years than in the last 500. Looking around the audience at some of the young people here, you're going to live through more change cumulatively than has been lived through by anybody at any time in history. It's phenomenal, wonderful. It's so exciting. And you can see that actually in the way the economic base is changing. In 2000, the investment in what economists call intangibles, broadly know how computer code, copyright, patents, all of kind of the intangible kind of assets surpassed tangible assets for the first time ever. So the people are investing more in know how than they were in factories and bricks and mortar. That run rate of investment now is only twice intangibles than it is intangibles. That's why the apps on your mobile or the smart things that you can do on your new intelligent meter to conduct electricity, to control electricity in your home, that's what's on the dashboard of your car is actually where the action is. And it's just going to create transformative possibilities. Don't get pessimistic about jobs. I'm sure you'll have people up here who will tell you all. The thinking machine, the learning machine, is going to mean that, you know, half, 47% on one estimate of all jobs you're currently doing will be eliminated in 20 years time. So there'll only be a world of jobs for very smart people who've been through the LSC and Hertford College Oxford and everybody else will be living kind of lives as kind of sole traders, agency workers. And the middle will just be absolutely nothing happening at all except unemployment. Don't buy it. I mean there'll be jobs in lots of face jobs, teaching, caring, mentoring, coaching, all of that. There'll be jobs in. There'll be new micro revolution in which there'll be kind of jobs in everything from microbrewing to microelectricity production to micro fashion to micro production of cars. There'll be digitalization will generate all kinds of jobs. The one thing you can be certain of. And here I share the view of Keynes, one of my kind of heroes, who wrote in the early 30s saying that he was obviously going to be regarded as mad, but he thought in the 1970s that living standards would double and that actually most working men would have cars. He was ridiculed. Let me make the same prediction. In 30 years time, living standards will have doubled and actually murking men and women will have artifacts that only the super rich have access to now. But the point is that to capitalize on this, for it actually to be an era of mass flourishing, because the exam question that you want your economic and social structures to answer is given all that, do we have structures that will allow us A to capitalize upon it and B, create a world in which the mass of us can flourish? And my answer to that is question in 2015 is a resounding no. And it's not just a question of technology or globalization or all the inadequacy of the education system or all the usual culprits that people point their finger at. I want to point my finger at something much more profound. I want to point my finger at the operation of contemporary capitalism and the way it's been allowed to develop. And I want to point my finger in particular at the company and what we've allowed to happen to the idea and notion of a company. Now a company derives from the Latin companion group coming together to share risk and adventure. And that's where the idea of a company comes from, is a kind of potentially companies are organizations of genius permitting great issues to be solved, people to innovate, great goods and services to be delivered, held to account for poor delivery by the marketplace. It's a bloody good idea, the company. But what's happened in the last 30 years, 40 years, is actually degeneracy of the company. And it's all around, all around for anyone who has eyes to see. And I find it particularly galling at this moment in time when a procession of business leaders climb to the rostrum to proclaim that the business interest that XYZ politician always on the labor side is anti business. As if the companies they run remain the kind of companies which actually could be wealth creators and wealth generators of the type they want them to be, rather than the degenerate wealth extractors that they are in practice, for example, I mean there's not time but I want to get to give you a chance to question me. And I'm also looking forward to drinking the atrium like I'm sure you are. But the. I mean just 20 when I wrote the state we're in, it's only 20 years ago, you know, ICI and GEC were two of the biggest companies in Europe. ICI the biggest chemical company ranking alongside basf, the German chemical company and GC ranking alongside Siemens. Well, BASF is the biggest chemical company in the world and Siemens is the biggest engineering company in Europe. ICI and GEC just don't exist. They're ceased. There'll be a film on Channel 4 about my book in a couple of weeks time. You can see me talking about something called the Hexagon Tower in a rather bleak part of Manchester which used to be the center of the ISI R&D division on Dyestuffs. And you can look below you for about 10, 12, 14 acres as far really as the eye can see. The driving rain in Manchester actually what used to be one of the biggest research capabilities in Europe gone disappeared. And actually ICI tried to maximize shareholder value. It tried to wheel and deal its way. At one stage it was kind of stalked by Hanson Trust Britain and going to break it up, demerge it and create unlock shareholder value in exactly the same way that GEC was stalked. What's happened is that actually they've been dismembered. They're ceased to kind of echo John Cleese this parrot no longer. They're not even stuck to the bloody kind of barb dead because you can't see them. They're physically gone and yet they're German compatriots in a much more different kind of context in which companies are respected in exist and prosper. I mean the travails HSBC are going through Tesco manipulating its profits by £250 million and being looked at by the ombudsman for the maltreatment of Its suppliers. Why is that happening? It's happening because it's deeply dysfunctional and they are actually prioritizing the financial priorities, immediate financial priorities, above the interest of the whole company. I think there's a. I'm a great admirer of EDF Energy. It's run by a Frenchman, Vasonderriva, who I like and respect very much. And they were looking to partner with Centrica to produce and build the next generation of nuclear power stations. Centrica dropped out of the partnership. Why did Centrica drop out of the partnership? Centrica had a partnership because it said a rate of return, a guaranteed rate of return by the British government in our utility of 10.5% for the next 35 years is too low. We want 13.5%, the kind of rate of return you might get from a Go Go hedge fund. And it dropped out and tried to find someone to share the risk with who was interested in building nuclear power stations. The only partner came up with was the Chinese. And the Chinese said, well, we'll take the minority role to build Sizewell and Hinckley. But actually the quip pro quo for taking a minority role and actually we're looking forward to 10.5% guaranteed over 35 years. We think that's bloody good, is that we want the British government to allow the Chinese, us, the Chinese nuclear power industry to wholly own, wholly build the next wave of nuclear power stations in Britain with Chinese parts shipped from China, so that 10, 15, 20% of our power will, with the next generation, as the two. The follow on from building Sizewell and Hinckley, they'll be built by the Chinese. And there may be occasions when we actually find that actually isn't so clever to have the potential, the lights turned off in Britain because of that. Why does that happen? Because Centrica is chasing these astonishing high rate of returns and as a company had degraded, benchmarked itself not against being a utility, but. But against something else altogether. Look at what happened with the privatization of Royal Mail. And look at the privatization of Thames Water, Thames waters, privatized in 1989 as a public limited company. What's happened 20 years later is that actually it can only build the Tideway Tunnel, the Super Tunnel, the super sewer under the Thames, which is going to cost £4 billion with a government guarantee. Why does the government got a guaranteed Thames Water utility doing this? Because it has 4 billion pounds of debts. Why has it got 4 billion pounds of debts? Because it's distributing dividends. 100% of all its profits are distributed as Dividends to a bunch of private equity shareholders in Luxembourg who own Thames Water. It's not interested, particularly in building up a utility so that you actually have fantastic water and all the rest is interested in actually stripping the country of cash to a bunch of international shareholders based in Luxembourg who are there because it's tax efficient. And so in order to build a bloody super sewer, they have to have a state guarantee, that's you, the taxpayer. And then to pay to service the loans on the debts, they're going to put water bills by 70 pounds a year. That is how privatization works in practice, which we have to genuflect towards. And here I'm going to make a prediction in a CE. I'm 64, but if I'm still walking, I'm still able to do it. I invite you back in 20 years time to write another essay of this type. I can tell you that as matters stand, Royal Mail will be owned by a bunch of private equity shareholders in some offshore tax haven. And you'll be paying stunning prices for your stamps. There will no longer be universal postal service and there'll be center right politicians telling us that we should marvel at the wonderful gains privatization and efficiency gains thereby. But it could have been so different. My point about these stories is actually time and time again what you're reading and you're learning about is actually how these our company structures are in de facto ownerless. Uniquely, when a company is privatized, when a company are public company is quoted on the stock exchange, uniquely, there's multiple, multiple shareholders. They have no kind, they don't have anchored shareholders, they all have the same vote, some don't vote at all. And they have no constitutional obligations to the company that they own. They have the right to sell these shares kind of in the markets whenever they choose, instantaneously. Most of the ownership is now, nearly half of it is now owned abroad or by global asset managers. And if it's the United States, a great proportion of your equity is owned by the employees. And actually there are instruments available to directors. If they think a takeover bid is unwelcome, they can say no. Germans have cross shareholdings. The Japanese have big insurance companies and banks. The Nordics have big industrial and business trusts. All around the world where you look to see corporate success, you find that they don't have the kind of ownership structure and the way that actually it's done in the uk, the average time a share is held is less than six months. 70% of the equity that's traded is done by Hedge funds and insurance companies, hedge funds and day traders and all the rest, they hold shares for an average of less than 20 seconds. And what this does, it drives the financial priority, their financial priority. It makes the share price the God, the alpha and omega. The thing that everyone has to look at and organize the company around. Why that list of degraded behaviors I've described has actually happened is you cannot begin to explain it. It's necessary but insufficient condition for the explanation is that ownership structure and that cascades into the patterns of reward in our society. Of course executive reward has gone up so that for every pound of turnover, British executives are the best paid in the world.
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Huh?
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It's not so much conspicuous consumption, but conspicuous earning. I was asked by the government, the incoming government, Osborne and Cameron to look at executive pay, fair pay in the public sector and implications might have for the private sector. And actually the amounts of executive pay has gone up four times in 25 years. Has productivity, innovation, performance gone up by four times in 25 years? And what's happened, of course is that remuneration has been keyed into share price performance and shares have been given away to allegedly incentivize director teams. What becomes the kind of impulse is to drive the company forward in ways that that buoy the share price up and that leads into the ways that they employ people. It's no accident that kind of UK Sport Direct employing 22,000 people has 20,000 of them on zero hour contracts. The growth of contingent labor is the concomitant of actually trying to organize your cost base so that you drive the costs down all the time. Wages have fallen. A lot of OECD countries, there's been stagnation in wages, but they've fallen furthest in the UK since 2008. Why? I humbly submit because our ownership structures incentivise that to happen more than elsewhere and our unions are weaker than elsewhere to resist it. And that's why I remarked about the decline of Korea earlier on and the way in which that's manifesting itself, that is, you know, again, if you. There's lots of reasons for this, you can all kind of come up. I'm sure you'll come up with lots of reasons for this when we're having a glass of wine and a second or two. But I defy you not to include the narrative I've just told you. And my argument in the state we're in 20 years ago, and my argument 20 years on is this is essentially, look, it doesn't have to be like this. The Kind of legal, constitutional and cultural structures of our corporations. The way they are financed and the way they don't innovate is not God given the result of free decisions by free women and men in marketplaces about which we can do nothing. Actually we can if we choose, design things to be different. And you know, if private institutions are producing poor results, which I submit they are, then in a democracy, in a democracy, and the collective will can be expressed to say let's redesign them, let's do something different. And you're not to be told that that's anti business in some way. I would argue that actually trying to put the company back on its feet so that it can reflect the nobility and genius of a great company is the most pro business thing you can do. And actually to allow things to carry on as they are is actually anti business because ultimately delegitimizes business. Because they cease to be wealth generators and become self evidently wealth extractors and create kind of all the dismay that we all think about it. And actually, you know, that becomes the fuel of the fire of this kind of anti immigration, kind of anti European, anti foreigner, kind of anti the other sentiment. Because if it becomes so difficult to build a life you've reason to value given your own employment prospects, that's how you react. Human beings do operate best in networks of reciprocal association. And if a member of that reciprocal network is actually creaming off or mal behaving in some way, then actually the others have to hold the malbehavior to account. It's what happens, that's what happens in human societies. And democracy is our instrument for doing it. And actually if you don't do that, then you reduce our politicians to kind of journeymen, journeywomen who actually can't do. They can't discuss anything that malfunctions in the private sector. Because the only thing that you can do as a politician do something in the public sector. And all you can do in the public sector is to privatize it or make it look more like the private sector, which is obviously seen to be the best. I think one can hold the microscope up to actually what's taking place in the private sector and ask some tough questions. Do you think that what's happened to Taswater, do you think the disappearance of ICI and gec, do you think that the way the banks operate in the banking crisis as ownerless corporations growing their balance sheets as fast as they damn well could because that led to the best remuneration for the directors teams in exactly the Same way that BP cut corners when it was drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, again to maximize the share price. Do you think that that's a good way of running British capitalism? And if you don't, do you want to change it? And if you want to change it, should you be dismissed as being anti business? And I get very excited about it. So I think the very first thing to do is to talk about the repurposing of British companies. And actually one of the nice things that happened, has happened to me is actually apart from old friends endorsing the book, you'll find an endorsement at the back of the book by the chief economist at the bank of England, Andy Haldane, who says, you know, Wilhatt's got a big idea which actually might do something about secular stagnation. And actually the publishers organized it so that his big idea was actually excluded from the quote, which I've got rather irritated about. But anyway, when we go to the paperback journey, the full quote will be on the back. But the big idea is the repurposing of companies that actually, that it's not just me, but it's actually a lot of people around the place are beginning to look at what happened, even people at the top of British business and being uneasy about what is taking place. And I argue for a company's act, a 21st century companies act, that actually if you're going to incorporate as a company and you're going to trade as a company, and the whole point of doing it in kind of 30 minutes and off you go without no questions asked, and all you have to do is go down to a company's house and buy it off the shelf and there you go. I don't recognize that as the right way to build a company. I think you have to declare your purpose if you wanted to. And when we thought about companies, the companions I talked about earlier on, and the first companies originated in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, that was the deal. The public authorities gave you a license to trade, which is a privilege for you to make profits. And sometimes they privileged you by giving you a temporary monopoly, sometimes they privileged you in other ways. And the quid pro quo was you delivered the purpose. So the East India Company delivered the purpose of actually going out to the Far east and kind of bringing spices back in British boats, British vessels, English vessels, as they were at the time, that was the quid pro quo. And when you watch great companies incorporate, the Lieber Brothers Incorporated import sunlight in the latter half of the 19th century to make the Best everyday things for everyday folk. When Boeing incorporated, they wanted to build the best planes that flew further, safest, fastest. I'm on the Scott Trust that owns the Guardian and the Observer. Our purpose is to ensure the Guardian is edited as it has been heretofore. Where you find great institutions over time, what binds them is this enduring purpose. That's the point of them. So I start off, let's have, let's actually get companies to incorporate around purpose. Let's actually redefine fiduciary obligations of directors as the delivery of that purpose. Let's actually, when they report, they report on the totality of the way they've delivered that purpose. And in reporting accounts that aren't just financial that will be included, but a whole range of metrics which actually you want to judge a company on. Let's actually give those shareholders who are going to commit to companies over time more votes. Let's give founders of companies, if they choose, more votes. I mean we all have our. We don't want Google. Its tax evasion and avoidance isn't great, but actually as an innovative company, you have to say it's pretty damn good. And when Larry Page and Sergey Grin founded it, they had three and a half percent of the equity but 37% of the shares. And they said we want to do that because we want to make sure Google's never taken over. And actually the management could think long term and innovate and LinkedIn's the same, Facebook's the same. A lot of companies now go to New York to kind of float because actually the founders can actually secure their company over time from the, the threat of it being taken over and suborned and undermined by actually people who take a much more short term financial interest than they the founders. Why can't we do that in Britain? Why does it have to be one vote? One? So that when you're in a takeover, as Cadbury's was in the Kraft takeover, 30% of the equity was held within six weeks by hedge funds who had the same vote as people who'd held the shares for years and years and years, who you could settle the fate of that company. And my view is that we can be much tougher on takeovers and we can start to think about the way in which ownership obligations are exercised. Investors should actually submit to a really proper stewardship code. You all invest with insurance companies, pension funds, unit trusts, you'll have some savings. But actually the fees that are charged the way equity is churned, the kind of companies that are invested in. You need to have more say in all of that. I think, by the way, that's going to start growing. I think I noticed around the university world that students are starting to say, well, we're quite, you know, climate change. We don't actually want the university superannuation fund to invest in lots of companies that have lots of unburnt carbon and they can only make money by burning carbon. Similarly with. We want to actually see that actually the assets which are held on our behalf are invested in companies whose purpose we actually respect, like and want. And I think this, I'm speaking here to what I think is going to be a more forceful movement kind of in the years ahead. And I think we should develop more variegated ownership templates. I mean, I think that. I mean, why can't we have a public benefit company? Why, when we privatize Royal Mail, can't we say, hmm, we don't want it to be a plc, and so it'll end up kind of in the, you know, in some offshore tax haven. Let's actually have it as a company where actually, you know, we'll give it even more privileges because as a water company, as a television company, as a newspaper, whatever it is, we really care about this company. We're going to place obligations on it, which they accept in return for some privileges because it's delivering a public benefit. We could, I think mutuals. I thought it was a disaster. I said this in the state room. The way the mutual building societies were all privatized in the 1990s. If it's a mutual assets built up over a century, those were built up to be held by their kind of common, ordinary men and women who built the thing up in perpetuity for their children and their grandchildren, not flipped. So the current director scene could make a killing, which is what took place in the 1990s before most of them actually turned out to be the handmaidens in the subsequent financial crisis. Northern Rock being a conspicuous example. Halifax and the HBoss. I mean, these were actually part of the epicenter of the financial crisis. Mutuals. We want to make them permanent. And lots more thoughts. And I even think there's a case and whisper it very softly for public ownership. So I don't want to go. I've got a few more things to say. In fact, quite a lot more things to say. And I've already spoken for 30 minutes. I think I want to try and bring my remarks to a close before all of you get bored or leave. But that's where you start by breathing life back into the company sector by repurposing companies. Then you have to ensure that they are financed and of course they'll be financed by repurposed banks. The bank of England must use an arsenal of interventionist tools to ensure that actually companies get the loans they need for a long time. And it's been changed by Mark Carney again. I mean, that's been one of the more startling things. Twenty years ago, the chief economist of the bank of England, Mervyn King, kind of wrote me a kind of little critique of my ideas that actually the bank of England had to change the way it backed the banking system, had to constrain the amount of lending going on property and redivert it through the multiple tools the bank has, the way it intervenes in the money markets, et cetera. It's technical. I don't want to go too deep in it. And I was told that couldn't possibly happen for reasons that it would undermine banking efficiency. I was told. Twenty years later, I find Mark Carney adopting almost completely the arsenal of instruments that I argued for 20 years ago in the state room. The times are changing, but having got them, they need to be used. And actually we should be told, and it should be public and very proud of the fact this is actually happening. But it's been done actually by stealth, new forms of intervention in the way the banks work too, so that they can take the risks of actually lending to enterprises who are moving forward in this world of intangibles that I described. Again, I mean, a lot more to be said about that. It's in the book. I. We can discuss it over a drink. That's two of these elements. The third element, the third kind of brick to drop is innovation. I think that there's no future for Britain except as a smart economy. And I think we have to really set ourselves some audacious goals. In a sense, we're kind of rather bewildered as a national community. We're not quite certain what the point. Point of us is anymore. I think we should actually be bold and set some. Why can't we be the most innovative country in Europe? Why can't we be a magnet for scientific endeavor? Why can't we say that in areas like green technology or big data or the new materials, in areas like graphene, we can't meet number one? Why can't we commit the resources to do that? Absolutely no reason except will and, you know, rd. We used to be one of the big R and D spenders in Europe. 35 years ago now one of the lowest, you know that can be reversed. And I think there's also. We have to recognize that in this world of kind of possibility there's multiple, multiple chances of making mistakes. Governments can make mistakes in the kind of areas they identify for research. Companies can make mistakes. You, you have a great apostle. I'm chair of the big innovation Center. This notion of open innovation being porous, being permeable, being non siloed, being iterative with working with others, being collaborative and that's as true of the state as it is of companies. So I think an intellectual policy regime has to be completely overhauled so we can have more sharing. Universities need to open when they do R and D. I think the intent by universities to make all their R and D proprietary and try and limit the kind of attempts of young entrepreneurs graduates from kind of using it. Well we have to rethink that the university sector innovate UK the catapults. Let's actually scale it up and do it seriously. If you do that, repurpose companies, reframe finance and commit to innovation. I think the British private sector could really take off. But that's not enough. We want a society with a mass of us flourish. And here I think that you need engaged citizens, educated consumers, intelligent workers. And we don't want kind of a labor market in which wages fall by the degree they've currently fallen. We're not going to get anywhere in a world in which actually people have constantly the backs of the wall because wages, real wages have fallen by 8% since 2008. That's the biggest cumulative fall over a period since the last decades of the 19th century. And again we all know the ritual explanations. It's all become poor education. We weigh weakness and skill. There's globalization until then globalization. Oh there's technology. There's another bloody reason we weaken trade unions. Trade unions are. I mean we all know actually when you can't. When there's another dam strike and you can't move around London because Transport for London cop there's been a tube strike or a bus strike. I like the next man or woman. It's fulminating. Jane will speak, she's heard the speech. But weakening trade unions, weakening workplace voice has been the capacity of these managements to do what they can do to workforce is endless rounds of kind of regrading jobs, shrinking workforces down, freezing wages with no workplace voice, with no counter workplace representation. I defy you again to tell the story without the weakness of trade unions. And although We've had Christine Lagarde, managing director of the imf. We've had Alan Greenspan, a very right wing Republican, ex chairman of the Federal Reserve. We've had all wringing their hands with inequality at Davos. Lots of complaints from the rostrum at Davos. Klaus Fab saying inequality the biggest menace facing the West. The OECD had a report in yesterday's Guardian, big report about the menace of inequality. You know, no one ever talks about the elephant in the room that actually the going for. We've made our flexible markets, as Vince Cable said in May, too flexible. And actually if we want a society in which we have mass flourishing, we have to think of actually who is going to represent workers as partners of purposed enterprise. Once you start talking about purposed enterprise, you can turn to unions and say, redefine yourselves not as the confrontational strikers against the dark instruments of capital, the kind of classic socialist position. Think of yourselves instead as actually co partners, co creators of enterprise, people who share this purpose, you know, people who actually want to be on the boards of companies. I well remember Bullock, you know, hundreds of thousands of trade unionists in the mid-1970s on the streets campaigning against actually the. Had the temerity of the labor government that wanted to put through legislation in which workers would be on the boards of companies, because that was collaborationist. I lived through that and the work like Jack Jones and leaders of the TUC at the time who wanted to do it. But the kind of old left were anti, anti, anti that. And I have to say that 21st century trade unionism has to think about how it religitimizes itself by actually thinking about how it repositions itself in relation to the enterprise. I'm a great advocate of lifelong learning. All I can say is bullet points. You know, I just want to get to, I want to give you an opportunity to ask me questions, but I want to. And the education system, lot to be said about that. I mean, my big point about the education system is twofold. One, if there are 800,000 babies born every year in Britain, you know, it is a calamity that nearly 300,000 of them, even now, after the improvements that have been kind of achieved over the last 20 years, still don't get five GCSes A to C when they're 16, unbelievable waste. And I also think that that's happening. There are only, and I know I feel this quite strongly, there are 80,000 kids at 15 who are entitled to free school meals. Only 20 get to Oxford and I simply don't believe that all 80,000 haven't got the kind of intellectual equipment to get to a premier university. I mean the scale of inequality in our education system just leaves you reeling. And if you ask the question, is this the route to a smart economy and a smart society, is this the route where the mass of us, where the massives are intelligent workers, educated consumers, kind of participated citizens? Absolutely not. And that is actually the flip side of that of course is education system in which 42,000 kids get three A's or better at a level of whom nearly 20,000 have been to private school. So it's bloody hard for Russell Group universities even if they, if that's who you're recruiting from, it's really very difficult to have 2/3 of your more than 2/3 of your entrance from state schools because they're simply up there. They're not the ones who've got the qualifications. And again, is that why is that? Is that because intellectually they're incapable or because of the investment that's been put in them cumulatively over from 5 to 18, why should it be that the education budget is going to be cut in real terms by 10% so that already the difference between the amount of money spent on the kind of schools that the leadership of the Conservative Party went to, where it's 20,000 a year in fees and if they board it's even more and at the moment spending 6,7000 pounds a year on state school kids, that's going to go down. Why is that? What's the argument for that? Is that tolerable in a society in which the mass of us must flourish? Again, I get exercised by that. Social contract is not only about all that, although I think those are the pivotal elements of it. I mean I have a lot to say about housing, pensions, the organization of the media as John introduced, but I simply haven't the time to talk about it. But my last point before I kind of try to wind up is that the. Or last two points before I wind up is that, you know, it's obvious to you that I want public endeavor and I want public initiative to kind of reshape the contours of our economy and society. That means a different kind of state. We need a makeover of the state. And I'm not, I don't believe and hope for Scottish independence, but I do think the Scots are doing us a great service in that they're really forcing us to think about the British constitutional settlement. I think it's going to be impossible for the kinds of tax raising and tax devour powers that Scotland have been given and will get more of, not to be given to English cities. That's already an embryo happening in Manchester. It's already an embryo and happening in London and long overdue. I think it's going to force a reconstitution of the House of Lords so it becomes, as Gordon Brown has argued, a senate of the country with these kind of devolved regions and devolved nations having a representation in a second chamber in our Parliament that I think is wholly, wholly beneficial. I think we'll lead to something else. I think it will lead to the reorganization of the Treasury. I think it's a disgrace that public goods, public investment, public infrastructure, education and health, criminal justice, things that we need are, and the way we do it in Britain is that's a residual residual. You start off by saying we cannot ever have the top tax rate higher than 45% and hopefully lower corporation tax lowered from 28 to 21% every 1%. Lowering a corporation tax is 600 million lost to the Exchequer at least. So corporation tax is going to go to 20 kind of income tax cannot be any higher, the basic income tax than 20p in the pound. We can't have national insurance higher than 10% that then gives you. Your tax revenues can't be higher because we can't possibly tax anyone more than we're currently taxing them. We all know that the biggest thing facing our country, not justice, not equity, not opportunity, not capitalizing on the great technologies that are coming through, not rebuilding our capitalism. The only thing that matters, ladies and gentlemen, is lowering the deficit, as you all know. So if you're going to lower the deficit, so you say five years tied to the deficit, nil or thereabouts, and your taxes are going to be what they're going to be because you can't ever adjust them. And your economy is going to grow at 2%. You're left with the residual is public expenditure. And then you say, well, we've only got this amount to spend, what are we going to spend it on? And that you end up with the kinds of shrinking of the state that we are confronted with and whether it is, whether, I don't know, each one of you will have your own kind of things you cherish. I actually cherish infrastructure, I cherish education, I cherish health and I also cherish the criminal justice system. What's been happening to our police force, to our courts, to the Crown Prosecution Service, to our prisons, to our probation service, to Our in the last five years it's been eviscerated. And if the austerity program continues as planned, in which actually public expenditure is a residual, it'll be further eviscerated. You'll end up having enormous, enormous queues to be tried. You'll have prisons bulging. No attempt at rehabilitation, a Crown Prosecution Service that can win nothing because it's always being outgunned and outspent by fancy rich lawyers on the other side, that is, you know, and I think just civilizations try to protect notions of justice at their heart and we're not doing that. So I'm, you know, one of my programs for being how good we can be is actually the federalization of the country and with it the diminution and recasting of the way the treasury goes about its affairs. And I just want to finish up by saying this, you know, is all of this kind of impossible? None of it's impossible. I mean, it's all could be. It all could happen. These changes that I've suggested, you know, they'll be knocked about in public debate. Some of them won't work as I hoped. Some of them might work better than I hoped. But actually this direction of travel could be the direction of travel of the country. And there is actually, I mean, the neoliberals. And on the right there is a crisis. I mean, George Osborne simultaneously talks about the need for austerity and all the rest, whilst he talks about HS2 Northern Powerhouse and actually has actually put his name to some industrial policy initiatives which sound like Tony Ben in the 1960s. He's Janus faced. He looks both ways. He hasn't got a coherent intellectual position. And actually the right is at sixes and sevens. It actually wants the animating element in it wants to leave the European Union to create a libertarian Britain, a kind of offshore of Kong that can exploit the world in a kind of free market paradise to which private equity traders and hedge funds can actually exploit their private garden in the city and the rest of us can do the best we can. Is that a compelling vision for the country? I think not. What's going to happen to notions of accompanying that conception? Why isn't it ever discussed? And I think that actually, you know, what I try to say in the book is that there is this crisis on the right. I think it's one of the reasons why it's very difficult for the Conservative Party to get more than 32, 33% of the vote in this general election. And it's why actually the other parties Lib Dems, Scottish nationals and Labour Party will get them overwhelming the majority of the vote. And the House of Commons will be hung again. And it will be hung, actually, as we quest for a coalition that can put this program together. Because, you know, you talk to the best in the snp, you talk to the best in Labour Party, you talk to the best in the Liberal Democrats, and by the way, you talk to thinking Tories and they're all kind of in this agenda. So I want to end up with a kind of a mission of. Kind of a message of hope. I actually think we could end the mercenary society, we could build a great country, how good we can be. Thank you.
- [56:25]
A
Thank you very much indeed. Will, I don't think anybody could accuse you of not taking on the big issues and indeed taking on a large number of them simultaneously. We have 10 to 15 minutes or so for questions. I'll take you in, I think, groups of three, as I do that. There's quite a lot of us, a lot of people would like to ask questions. It would be very good, given how many people are in the audience, if you asked a question rather than made a speech and if you indicated who you are and if it's relevant where you come from. So there's a gentleman right at the front here and then gentleman at the back there. And.
- [57:11]
C
Please, hi, my name's Gordon Tate. I take out patents on very fast refuelling of electric vehicles and also consider myself a bit of an expert on the history of ipr. One of the things which doesn't seem to have come up this evening is, is the massive chasm that seems to be between the practitioner and the academic. 300 years ago, to this very day, I think John Harrison won the prize for longitude. 150 years ago, we had people like James Watt and Thomas Newcomen, who, if the telephone had been around for them, they'd have had to wipe coal dust and oil off their hands to answer that phone. Whereas now there seems to be a fear almost of getting your hands dirty. And I think the question I'm really kind of saying is how can we put into practice what I believe 100% in what you're saying tonight? How can we actually convince the people who have a fear of the individual, where nowadays the likes of James Watt would only be allowed to design widgets for his steam engine, where 150 years ago he designed the whole thing.
- [58:29]
B
Okay, thank you. Very good. Thank you.
- [58:31]
A
Take a question just at the back and then one.
- [58:34]
B
Take the lots from away.
- [58:36]
A
I'll take three and then we'll.
- [58:40]
D
My name is Vincent Burke, I'm a humble civil servant for now until the next round of redundancy. You obviously have a very powerful resume of the last 20 years and the excesses of capitalism in the UK. For 13 years of that 20 we had a Labour government. So how culpable do you think previous Labour governments with their Brown Blair prawn cocktail offensive towards the city are? And how confident do you think any future Labour government will be in a position to make those changes? Whichever of the Millibans, if any of them ever makes it to down the.
- [59:18]
A
Street and gentleman right at the back.
- [59:23]
E
Hi, I'm John Dean, I'm a sociology lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. You used quite optimistic evidence from London and from Oxford and Cambridge at the start of your presentation. I was wondering what future you see for Rill and Clacton and Merthyr, Tydfil and Dudley in this sort of analysis outside of the cosmopolitan city.
- [59:47]
B
Good question. Look, I'll be very quick because I have a lot more to ask questions. I mean I. Often kind of say that it's a bit like lighting a fire really. I do think that the, and you're right, you know, the end 25 area and actually in fairness, you know, parts of Sheffield and Leeds and parts of Manchester, you can be, you can really tell quite an optimistic story. Edinburgh too, Cardiff as well. But you're quite right, you know, Clacton. Yeah. I mean Britain's seaside towns and the coastal, you know, what's happening on the coast is really dramatic and there's you know, parts of the Midlands and actually both sides of the Pennines, the smaller towns which are kind of unbelievably desolate and it's very hard to, you know, all I can say is that you just have to hope you can get something going in our large conurbations which back feed into these areas. But I'm. I don't have a better answer and I know, but those geographical inequalities are really. I don't know what your own answer would be but I mean, I mean of course, you know the Ukip, that ward in Clacton which had this kind of huge majority for Douglas Carswell which had this, the most deprived part of Britain and you thought, well, you know, what could you come up with to make it less deprived? I mean you could certainly. I mean I think there's, I do think that forms of, there are forms of cooperative forms of mutual. In the book I argue for that quite aggressively and Actually, that might be a way of actually dealing these parts of the country kind of into prosperities elsewhere. But you know, it's a drama. Not a good answer. Best I can come up with and thank you for the question. Labour, New Labor. Look, I mean. I mean both Ed Miliband. Well, Ed Miliband has certainly read the book. Ed Balls knows its content. He's asked me to give him it tomorrow. So I will. When I gave it to David Miliband. David Miliband with some trepidation because I thought. Well, he immediately acknowledged that actually New Labour should have done more to repurpose the private sector. And it was a mistake and they did make efforts. One of the troubles is that you've got to remember what it was like in the late 1990s, 92, 2000s. I mean this was Francis Vilkuyama, the end of history. Bill Clinton had just abolished Glass Steagall. The financial system was running amok, as we now know. But the trick to pull seemed to be let's kind of milk this golden goose for the tax revenue and spend it on kind of public and social good. And actually John has mapped in his work and he can speak to this, but I mean between 97 and 2010, you know, on the public expenditure side, Labour actually did deliver a lot of public good. I mean whether it was sure start, whether it was education, whether it was health. I mean, I don't know whether John, whether you. I mean, I mean it wasn't bad anyway and that is a sharp contrast to what's happened since. But you're. And who do I. I mean I. I sometimes also want to say this is that. Politicians actually respond to what comes up from below. It's very difficult for an Ed Miller for the two eds to kind of pick this up and run with it if there's not a big popular demand from below. I sometimes quit my father, who was one of the team in between kind of May and July 1945, whose job was to educate the troops what the manifestos were the three major parties in the 45 election. And dad used to say you get out of the truck with a loud hailer in front of a couple of thousand soldiers about to be demobbed. And no one wanted to hear about what the Conservative Party must manifesto was. They didn't want to hear what the. They didn't want to hear about a program for change. The Labour government 1945 wasn't delivered by a kind of cabinet of people who were inspired leaders. It was reflecting a roar from below you know, where's the roar from below about the operation of contemporary capitalism and the demand, the unstoppable demand for change that actually you need? And, you know, where are the. Where's the critical mass of intellectuals? Where's the people in the universities? Where are the social forces that actually demand that things should be different? So I think that there's. Yes, these men temporized. Yes. Blair in particular actually was seduced by. We all know the story. They should have done much more than they did. Some of the things they did, as I describe in the book, were craven, but the forces that would hold them to account for doing better were very weak. So I'm, you know, yes, you know, I'm prepared to kind of, you know, I will Jacuz, but I'll, you know, I'll also recognize, you know, that the moat in, you know, a wider eye than just their failures. And on this very good point about, you know, you know, kind of you could design it, you know, about the way in which. Actually, look, I just have to say that it's that there's no one person who could design the whole of an iPhone. It is teams that do these things in 2015. It doesn't mean that there can't be unifying vision or unifying purpose. And I guess what I'm trying to say is that by repurposing companies, you might get more of that vision and unity of purpose around which you can build a team in which not one but dozens of people can work to a common end. And I think that our structure should try to drive to what you're describing, but I think you have to do it in a different way from doing it in 1785 with James Watt. Thank you.
- [66:43]
A
I'm going to take one more round of questions. Questions. There was somebody at the front here.
- [66:46]
B
Try and be very brief, actually.
- [66:50]
A
There's going to be one at the top up here, please.
- [66:57]
F
Paul McGrail, Catholic Workers Group. From Margaret Thatcher onwards, every government has sold off major assets. People too. London can't believe that everything, you know, transport, energy, water, everything has been sold off, even the mail. Is this because of the need to pay bills during the past 35 years, or is it because of a lack of faith in British management? As an example, I put forward the British motor industry, which was comatose and then sold off to the Germans and the Japanese and the Indians, is now prospering.
- [67:38]
B
Good question. Yep.
- [67:44]
G
I wondered whether or not you'd be interested in renationalization and where are you from? I'm over Here.
- [67:54]
B
Oh, hi. Hi. Hello.
- [67:56]
A
The whole audience.
- [67:58]
G
And I wondered, I know you haven't spoken about this, but I wondered whether or not you'd be in, you'd like to have or to see the age of voting lowered to 16.
- [68:11]
B
Oh goodness. Okay. Okay, 16.
- [68:17]
A
Two questions there. And there were two people who were catching my eye in the middle here. We'll take those and I think we may then stop. But two just coming here. And then after that, if you could pass the microphone behind you. And then we'll take those. I think we probably will have to stop after that.
- [68:38]
B
Okay. All right. Peter o'. Keegan.
- [68:41]
H
Well, you would know quite a lot about Germany. I am struck by the difference in attitudes in Germany and here, both to levels of inequality and to things like tax evasion. The huge public furore across the entire political spectrum. In Germany when early Hoeness the hero was caught tax avoiding, whereas in the UK one out of 1100 get prosecuted. And I'm also struck by the extent to which private sector behavior such as PRP has certain performance related pay has penetrated the mentality of the public sector. As the sort of former head of the high wage commission, what can we do to shift views on inequality?
- [69:35]
B
Three great questions.
- [69:36]
A
I'll be very quick.
- [69:36]
B
And just one more sixth and I'll give.
- [69:39]
A
No, no, I think four. And then we'll stop because people can carry on in the reception afterwards.
- [69:44]
B
Okay, very good.
- [69:46]
I
David Harris, just an interested citizen, thank you ever so much for that, both for your ideas and the passion with which you expressed them. But there was for me a big gap in what you said, Mr. Houghton, which was that for many of us the big issue is the main issue is not neither reducing the deficit nor increasing public spending, but the catastrophe of global warming. And isn't it the failure of the European left to have failed to engage with those environmental issues that has seen an abdication from political involvement of the under 35 voter and the handing over of all of that issue to the conspiracy theorists and utopian ruralists.
- [70:39]
B
Utopian ruralist, I like that. Actually.
- [70:43]
I
Just invented it.
- [70:45]
B
Is there a fifth question? I mean I. Burning for one. There's a burning. Burning. There's someone burning for a question.
- [70:52]
A
One just here and then.
- [70:54]
B
Yeah, I'll be very quick.
- [70:57]
J
Yes, incredibly quick. Ed Rennie, Rez Publica. You mentioned the head of EDF Energy. You didn't mention in this hotbed of atheism, that is lse, that he's a devout Catholic. And my very quick question is, don't we find an ally in Catholic social teaching, partly because it doesn't require any actual religious belief, but it'll be a good tool in kind of taking on the religious right, particularly in America, who support some of the things that you are so intractably and rightly opposed to.
- [71:32]
B
That's a very interesting question too. I mean, I do think I'm very struck actually by this, that actually there are kind of two traditions, not just the Catholic social tradition, but the Quaker tradition, you know, I, you know, the, this Filmmaking for Channel 4 profiling, you know, the water industry and comparing Thames water with Welsh water, which is a cooperative. And it turns out that the guy who kind of had the idea of not making himself very rich, actually, which he could have done by buying Welsh water with a mate and getting. And flipping it. And he actually has had built it to be kind of a mutual. To benefit one and a half million water consumers. You know, he's married to a devout Quaker. You know, why has Cadbury's developed a distinctive kind of form of capitalism? It's Quaker. I talked to Matthew Jenkins at Barclays and you know, he wants to, I know it sounds far fetched, but he actually, you know, he thinks that actually ultimately, you know, he wants a bank you can trust back to its Quaker roots. And you're right, you know, I think that Catholic social doctrine, you know, I'm not a Catholic, but I mean, you know, when I was asked by the previous Pope to do a bit of work on, when he's one of them, he's got papal encyclicals on work, I said I was very struck by talking in these terms to the businessmen who were there, that actually they all get it. And someone like Van Sanderiva, who's read these paper and citicals, yes, he calls his deal, he's done a deal with 25,000 workers in Hinckley and he calls it a social covenant and deliberately names it from that tradition. And so, yes, you know, I mean, I find, you know, I look for allies where I can find them. And you're right, you know, the kind of, the kind of, the kind of, the kind of the best elements of contemporary capitalism, often you find that the, when you scratch a bit, that the leader or the purpose around which the enterprise has been organized does have.
- [73:56]
A
Roots.
- [73:56]
B
In a kind of a moral framework which has, you know, a religious base. Yeah, so I'm going to accept that. I think it's very interesting and I, you know, it's something I want to reflect on. So, you know, thank you for the question on the global warming, of course, look, you can't. But my point about this is, on global warming is that if you want to get companies to kind of take this, and I think that you can do a lot, obviously it's a government initiative, it has to be. But also you want companies to take it seriously too. It is purposed companies that actually, and the framework of reporting that I'm requiring, or I think should be required, that will give climate change campaigners and people interested in sustainability some kind of purchase that they don't currently have on the dynamic of contemporary capitalists. And I don't think you're going to, we won't make much progress in kind of really persuading people to put, to be kind of solve these, to help solve these challenges unless they're purposed. So, you know, my invitation is, you know, in a world in which you have to incorporate around a business purpose and that's your fiduciary obligation, you know, you can build into that purpose, sustainability and you can make some progress on that, on that front. That's what I, So there's lots more to say to you on that. On this question of voting at 16, I mean, I'm, I actually there's an awful lot of things that I worry about and that's one of the things I don't worry about very much. You know, I just haven't got the bandwidth really. I mean, I, Part of your audience might disagree. Oh, kind of. What's that?
- [75:45]
A
Part of your audience might disagree.
- [75:46]
B
Yeah, well, I, I mean, I, of course, I mean, I, you know, I've been 16 too, without a vote. I mean, I, I, I one, the good thing would be that it would, that it would, that I think that if you have the Labor Market at 16, why can't you vote? If you can, if you, if you can. But I mean, I mean the counter argument of course is that, is that, you know, you know, adult the, is that there is a, that actually to what extent can someone who's 16 be a, you know, kind of engaged citizen? I mean, and I, you know, and I mean I'm, if, if, and I would sit this out, watch the argument and actually I would go with the majority of you on this. But I'm not, you know, I've got a lot of things and I'm out there enough, you know, on stuff, on all the stuff that I talked about tonight without adding the campaign for 16 year old votes is another bloody thing to be kind of shot down for, you know, so I try and keep my Political powder dry. But if you make a case and convince me, I'm with you, you know, you can take the lead and I'll follow on Germany and inequality and you're absolutely right. I mean I, you know I got, when I wrote the statement with my admiration for the German economy and German society, I was much mocked. You know, I actually thought that, I actually thought that Germany might be a stronger and more powerful economy than, than Britain in the year 2010. And there was a kind of avalanche of right wing commentators kind of queued up to kind of mock me for this view that actually I was. How can I possibly think that with their sclerotic labour, labour markets and their sclerotic forms of corporate governance and their high taxation it was obvious that fleet footed Britain with its low tax, kind of lightly regulated kind of and its commitment to the industry of the future financial services was going to kind of leave poor Germany behind. Well, you know, again, I mean I'm, and I think that, I mean I do think that, I think that I went around the, I went around Ian McGregor's, Neil McGregor's Germany exhibition at the British Museum which has been over now but it's very striking, you know, how the kind of, you know, they've gone through these world wars, this, this kind of unfathomable, unthinkable thing of the Holocaust, you know, which is just, you know, you can't, they can't explain that to themselves so that their own people could have done something like that. And you know, it does create a kind of, it does create a much more kind of modest culture I think and very difficult to get Germans to assume a leadership role as a result. Maybe some of the reverses that we're going through is going to lead to some fundamental questioning about values that we take for granted. Maybe a bit of failure would actually help the British start thinking harder about their own economic and social order and the indifference that we have or comparative indifference between equality and I'm not certain by the way that we are that indifferent to inequality. I think that, you know, I think people have a very deeply rented sense of fairness and I think that the, I think that the kind of, the kind of disproportionate rewards at the top and the way in which a kind of, it's not so much the top, we talk about the top 0.1% but it's a kind of caste that's developing and you know, this is a democracy and it's a fair minded democracy with the, the deep sense of fairness and I Think the emergence of a kind of caste. Large parts of London being uninhabitable by ordinary men and women because it's just so expensive. I don't think it's going to wash, actually. So don't despair of your countrymen. It may, you know, inequality, I think, is becoming a more serious issue here too. I think it's about to metastasise into a real cancer. I don't think people, and the young people here can talk to me afterwards. But I think that, you know, I think it's important, tolerable, where you have people kind of digging down four, five stories underground for kind of, you know, underground car parks and cinemas where kind of literally 800 yards away, there's kind of four, five, six young people crowding into some kind of ghastly kind of flat, you know, where they, you know, rotating through hutching, as it's called, you know. And this kind of, this kind of lived inequality, so kind of so cheek by jowl, it's like London is not actually tolerable, it's not sustainable. And lastly, your point about the car industry. Look, I want to. This is my big point, you know. This is my big point, you know, Tata's done jolly well buying Jaguar Land Rover. The Japanese have done very well. BMW bought the Mini plant in Oxford and have made it one of the most productive kind of plants in their portfolio. It's not as though there's two views about this. One is because they're foreign and they're better than us. I don't buy that. I mean, they're just people who've got ownership, right? PMW is family owned. The majority of it's family owned. It takes a 50 year view to task family owned. The Japanese companies, there are more people coming forward for apprenticeships for Nissan in the Northeast. Picking up the chap from Sheffield Hallam, you know, it's easier to get a place. The 700 folk apply for the 120 places. At Hertford College Oxford, there's 20,000 people applying for the 200 apprenticeships that Nissan offer in the Northeast. How can it be that what's going on there? And I just say these companies are well owned, they do ownership seriously. They take a view, they innovate, they invest and they're good places to work. And actually what's wrong is not us or our unions or our skills and all the usual things that are. What's wrong is that we've allowed the idea of the company to degrade and nobody talks about it. And I've tried to talk about it tonight, and I hope you've some of you are partly convinced. Thank you very much. Thank you.