08.02.1996

The stakes are high

Everyone is talking about it. There is almost nowhere you can go to avoid it: newspapers, learned journals and magazines, the company boardroom, ‘leftwing’ think-tanks, TUC jamborees ... soon even the pub will cease to be a safe haven from it. What is it? The ‘stakeholding economy’, of course.

The ‘stakeholding economy’ is a hard beast to nail down. Almost everyone claims to have invented it and almost everyone praises it. In a recent speech Adair Turner, director-general of the CBI, suggested that it must be the objective of the bosses to give “individuals opportunities, prospects and participation in the economy’s success - dare I say a stakeholding?”

Turner’s positive comments are fully backed by ‘lefty’ professor David Marquand, who enthused in The Independent about how the politics of stakeholding could turn out to be “the best thing to have happened to the British left in my adult lifetime” (January 15).

At first, this may seem like an odd alliance - the bosses’ club and the British ‘left’ uniting around a ‘radical’ set of ideas. However, if you scratch the surface it becomes rather less mysterious.

The purest and most fashionable exponent of the ‘stakeholding economy’ is Will Hutton, which he outlines in The state we’re in. It would not be a wild exaggeration to say that Hutton is rapidly becoming the messiah-elect of the liberal bourgeoisie, haunted as it is by the spectre of ever-increasing class polarisation and the seemingly unstoppable development of an alienated ‘underclass’.

These faint-hearted supporters of capitalism hanker for a near mythical golden age when social consensus ruled.

Hutton taps into this angst and gives it a theoretical expression - hence the runaway success of his book, which has now become a virtual totem for all ‘radical’ and ‘liberal’ defenders of capitalism.

Reassuringly, Hutton stresses that he is opposed to any return to 1970s corporatism or “socialism in the twentieth century, Scargillite tradition” (all Hutton quotes are from The Guardian, January 17). He just wants to preserve capitalism ... from the excesses of capitalism. In other words, the American casino-style free market - made flesh by Thatcherite economics - has deformed poor old British capitalism.

To eradicate the evils of short-termism (ie, share-holding capitalism), Hutton urges us all to join hands and construct a shiny new utopia - the “moral community” where the rich and poor, the exploiter and the exploited forget their differences and march together into the bright stakeholding sunset.

This “moral community” includes everybody. However, as Hutton sternly reminds us, “Inclusion is not a one-way street: it places reciprocal obligations on the individual as well as rights - and in every domain and in every social class” (my emphasis).

Unemployed black workers in Peckham will, no doubt, be delighted to discover that they have an equal and reciprocal relationship with Elizabeth Windsor - perhaps they will be able to cadge a fiver off her when their giro is late?

Hutton even anguishes about the dilemma of the frustrated boss who is unable to “construct long term trust relationships at the workplace”. It must be tough. David Marquand goes even further. He castigates trade union leaders for being “more anxious to screw the highest possible wages” out of employers, rather than “share managerial power and the responsibilities that go with it” (The Independent, January 15).

The trump card which Hutton slams on the table is the supposed fact that companies like BT, BP and Marks and Spencer call themselves stakeholder companies, therefore they can “hardly dissociate themselves from the idea”. Unipart also calls itself a stakeholding company, yet it refuses to recognise trade unions!

What unites all the advocates of stakeholding - and, for that matter, communitarianism, social-ism, etc - is an agreement that socialism/communism has been ruled out of court and that we are entering a new historical chapter. To use a now infamous expression, we are witnessing the ‘end of history’. This is the essence of Hutton’s much trumpeted stakeholding economy.

Do not buy it. Marquand may insist that, “The question is no longer whether capitalism should be replaced by capitalism ... It is what kind of capitalism we should embrace” (January 15). We know that capitalism is not an eternal system, but one that will destroy itself sooner rather than later. Our job is to make sure it does not destroy us in the process.

Danny Hammill