State of the Nation
Eamonn Butler is interviewed on his most recent book, The Rotten State of Britain
The way to grow poor, the way to grow rich.
By his own admission, Eamonn Butler spent several fruitless years trying to generate enthusiasm from publishers for his book chronicling what he perceives as our nation’s decline from sceptr’d isle to septic embarrassment.
But even he could scarcely have imagined how, when it did eventually see the light of day, The Rotten State of Britain would end up chiming so perfectly with the funereal mood of the times.
In the book, Butler takes a forensic scalpel to all aspects of modern British society, from the broken economy to abuses of political privilege via the rise of spin, surveillance culture and the nanny state.
As you might expect from the head of the Adam Smith Institute – the U.K.’s leading free market think tank – it’s an unashamedly polemical piece, railing against the “dishonesty, deceit and incompetence” of the leaders Butler charges with bringing a once proud country to the edge of financial and moral bankruptcy.
But despite the book’s subtitle: How Gordon Brown Lost A Decade And Cost A Fortune – Butler insists he has no party political axe to grind.
“The problem is not necessarily New Labour – it’s bigger than that,” he says over tea in the conservatory of his central Cambridge home.
“The Adam Smith Institute works with the government of the day, and when Blair and co. came in 1997, we were prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.”
“They had seemed to grasp the essential message: they weren’t going to tax and spend and they were going to be a much more open type of government. During the first couple of years of New Labour I turned up at Downing Street more often than I did under Mrs. Thatcher.”
But it was not a marriage destined to last.
“They disappointed us, really,” says the 57-year-old. “We saw the real tax burden go up through stealth taxes, we saw the government sector expanding, we saw there was no enthusiasm to carry on with privatising state industries or even making them more efficient. And similarly with the culture of spin – they were trying to convince us everything was absolutely fantastic when it quite clearly wasn’t.”
“And it’s not a party political thing at all. It’s that we’ve got a Government that’s become hugely centralised that doesn’t actually understand the idea of the rights of the individual. So that was the disappointment – it was principally how governments can apparently ride roughshod over our rights, which have been built up over hundreds of years, and over the bodies of many brave souls.”
“When you look into it line by line and subject by subject, it begins to overwhelm you how bad things have become. The relationship between government and officialdom and the rest of us has changed. We used to be the masters – we should be the masters, and now they’re our masters. I feel that in the way policing is done, in the nanny state, in the number of CCTV cameras pointing at me – all this I find very unnerving as a libertarian.”
Butler also claims to have anticipated the bust at the end of New Labour’s economic boom some years ago.
“A lot of us predicted it,” he says. “You could see, despite all the talk of prudence, that Gordon Brown was expanding the public sector faster than it had ever been expanded before.”
But whatever it says about the Government’s fiscal credibility, doesn’t Britain’s current economic crisis also leave one of the sacred shibboleths of the Adam Smith Institute – the deregulated free market – looking more than a little bruised?
“I don’t actually accept that,” he says. “It’s still the case that every bit of a bank’s business, from how they deal in the securities markets to how quickly they answer the phone to their customers – all of that is regulated. We have the most incredible weight of regulation on our banks. If you get Michael Phelps and weight him down with chains and he sinks, you don’t call that a crisis of swimming. That’s a failure of regulation weighting him down.”
So is he saying the city actually needs less regulation? “It needs better regulation. We’ve had the regulation there but the regulators weren’t doing their job – they were looking the other way. It’s very fashionable to attack bankers and their bonuses, but I don’t think you can blame bankers for a boom created by politicians.”
Much of The Rotten State of Britain – which Butler researched over a period of nine years – rings true, especially on issues like spin, surveillance, the breakdown of family values and the true cost of the country’s debt.
Other parts – the harrumphing about familiar bogeymen like red tape and tax burdens and the welfare bill – have the shrill air of a Daily Mail leader column about them. There is also a persuasive counter-argument to be made that, if anything has brought Britain low, it is the excesses of the very free market that Butler holds so dear: the insatiable drive for profits and “efficiency” that has eroded our job security; the relentless pressure to accumulate more and more consumer goods – and more and more personal debt – in the erroneous belief it will make us happy, rather than just creating more landfill; the ruthless, shameless Britain of asset-stripping private equity firms, Kafkaesque call centres, tabloid humiliation and the sort of corporate hegemony that leaves CEOs wielding more power than prime ministers.
Besides, by focusing exclusively on the bad apples in the barrel, isn’t The Rotten State of Britain in danger of overstating the extent of our nation’s malaise? Whatever the doom-mongers and naysayers and pettifoggers of all political stripes would have us believe, isn’t this, at the end of the day, still a great country to live in?
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“It’s a great place to live and we do enjoy a great quality of life,” Butler concedes. “That has taken a knock just recently and I think it’s taken a bigger knock than in most other countries because our public finances have been overstretched and we have been living off borrowing and debt, both personal and public.”
“But it’s still a great place – we’ve got the English language and cosmopolitan attitudes and a mixed, interesting society. At the same time, I feel we’ve allowed ourselves to drift into a situation where the basic rules that once protected our liberty have been suspended.”
“It’s not like we’re living in Stalin’s Russia – but we’ve actually put in place the mechanism whereby if some bad people got into power, they could make it Stalin’s Russia without any problem at all.”
Before we take away his belt and shoelaces, though, Butler offers a glimmer of hope for the future.
“I’m an unremitting optimist I’m afraid,” he smiles. “I have this great faith in human nature that it will out. But I think we’ve got a big repair job to do.”
© Cambridge Newspapers Ltd.
It was principally how governments can apparently ride roughshod over our rights, which have been built up over hundreds of years, and over the bodies of many brave souls.