We can escape the state we're in

There is nothing inevitable about the ills that continue to disfigure our economy and society

- Will Hutton

Thirty years ago, ‘The State We're In’ was published. Baby boomers and generation X may remember it; millennials and gen Z are excused. You were either babies or not yet born.

The success of the bestselling economics book since the second world war bewildered its author (me), the publishing industry and Britain's political class. One reviewer captured widespread dismay, especially on the right, depicting me as the most dangerous man in Britain. I had dared to challenge the indisputable Thatcherite truth that her medicine had renewed Britain. Instead I argued that she had bequeathed a divided and weakened society that actually undermined the economy, and that the better route was a stakeholder, high-investment capitalism that put fairness at its heart. Yet in 2026 we are where I feared in 1996 that we would be. Continued inattention to fixing the financial architecture in which our companies can grow and flourish has meant that many of our great businesses have been dismembered while others decay and stagnate. Too many young companies that might replace them are acquired or sold abroad. Societally, living standards are barely increasing while a century of improving public health and lengthened life expectancy is being reversed, especially in our former industrial heartlands. A great economy cannot be built upon a weak society. The nascent anti-Europeanism of the mid-1990s has morphed into Brexit. Internationally, the liberal order that underpinned growing postwar prosperity is being shredded.