The prophet of stakeholding now wants the BBC, but he is surely a thinker, not a doer
He's a shambling bear of a man, always late, always enthusiastic, always brimming over with ideas that pour out faster than he can form the words, compelling and exasperating in equal measure.
Will Hutton, one of the country's most prominent left-wing writers, is a candidate to become the next director-general of the BBC. To embittered souls he fired from the Observer during his hands-on editorship - he is now editor-in-chief - it is breathtaking that he should be on anybody's list to run anything, never mind a huge and complex organisation such as the Beeb. But Hutton's is a name to consider for all sorts of top jobs.
His pitch for the director-generalship is that the BBC needs more income and should get it from an extra digital licence fee on set-top decoders. In return, the BBC would provide digital programming. Hutton says: "It is an organisation that is overstretched, trying to sustain its core networks at the same time as having a presence in the new world . . . They are in trouble, you can see it in a hundred and one ways."
He also argues that the corporation is not transparent, and needs to become more open if it is to remain a great public institution. He draws a parallel with the Bank of England, which, in return for its independence, had to become far more open and is more legitimate because of that. Hutton has changed his mind about the bank; back in 1995 he portrayed it as the spider at the centre of the evil web of finance. His view now that a new accountability warrants independence for old institutions such as the BBC and Bank of England is part of his stakeholding approach - of which more later.
Hutton insists that the BBC's governors will not choose him. "They wanted to be seen to cast the net wide," he says. Not a man given to false modesty, he is probably right about this. After all, this is not a contest in which one candidate stands out as the obvious choice.
Nevertheless, he was ideal for the shortlist. The success of his 1995 best-seller, The State We're In, cemented his reputation as a serious critic of the British establishment and the policies it had embraced during the Thatcher years. Many of those who bought the book, though, would be hard-pressed to spell out a Huttonite programme, if they even got all the way through a pretty heavy work of political economics. In retrospect, it is clear that the number of people buying The State We're In was an early indication of the scale of anti-Conservative feeling building up ahead of the general election.
The book was an extraordinary achievement. Hutton says: "It is the thing that changed my life." It made him an obvious choice as editor of the Observer after the Guardian had taken over the ailing Sunday newspaper. As an experienced, high-profile journalist, who had been economics editor of both the BBC's Newsnight and the Guardian, he would have been in the running anyway. After the book, however, there was no doubt that he could bring to it the coherent moral and political vision that would be one of the ingredients necessary to rebuild it as a great liberal newspaper.
As it turned out, despite cost-cutting redundancies, the paper continued to lose money and readers. Within two years it became clear a change of management was needed. Hutton was abruptly elevated out of the editor's office. Critics have continued to carp about his continued presence on a handsome salary, and every so often a rumour that he's about to be ousted circulates around the media parish. It seems unlikely. The Observer has an intellectual coherence as a paper now, with Hutton's way of thinking stamped on it.
That way of thinking, summarised in one word, is "stakeholding". Broadly speaking, stakeholding refers to a form of market economy where the profit motive is institutionally constrained. In his most recent volume, The Stakeholding Society, he explains: "The unifying idea is inclusion: the individual is a member, a citizen, a potential partner. But inclusion is not a one-way street; it places reciprocal obligations on the individual as well as rights." The stakeholding economy, in other words, is based on reciprocal relationships of trust rather than pure, faceless exchange.
It is easy to mock this as "happy-clappy economics" or "cuddly capitalism", and people do. After all, there's no easier or more enticing target than an immensely successful author. The subsequent TV version of the Book According to Will did him no favours either, making him seem extraordinarily dogmatic and pompous. My problem with stakeholding is different, however. It is that it's hard to tell the stakeholder economy apart from any other market economy. All economies are based on relationships. Professional economists - who simply dismiss Hutton's books as literary fluff, much as they do those of his hero, John Kenneth Galbraith - do indeed work with models of pure, competitive laissez-faire. But they are aware that they are just that: models, abstract and simplified versions of some aspects of the world. It is the institutional detail that distinguishes capitalist economies. Stakeholder theory is too vague to do the job. It's woolly rather than cuddly.
The global financial crisis of the past two years has made Hutton even more of an anti-market evangelist. The origins of the crisis lay in Asia's system of stakeholder banking, where banks continued to lend to failing companies. Even so, Hutton is in good company in blaming the crisis on western banks that lent to Asian banks on the understanding that the banks wouldn't let the companies go bust and the governments wouldn't let the banks go bust. And he is also one of many to conclude that this was a system-wide failure of market capitalism.
He can live with my disagreement about this. But it alarms him that the government does not share his analysis. The Third Way is nothing if it is not stakeholding, he believes, yet, "the government has resolutely put it to one side". New Labour, Hutton fears, has no room for any part of an intellectual tradition it has labelled - and therefore dismissed - as old Labour, the tradition of Tawney and Keynes and Galbraith.
He is right to the extent that the vocabulary of stakeholding has been dropped by the new Labour machine. Does this signify an underlying shift in philosophy on the part of the government or simply its often-demonstrated dislike of being pinned down to specific ideas that might inhibit its ruthless pragmatism? In fact, is not the Third Way simply stakeholding under another name? The imprecision of both ideas makes it hard to answer.
Hutton is also right in what he pinpoints as the big philosophical question for new Labour: how can it bridge the political space between Blairite centrism and that older left-wing tradition?
Hutton's intellectual formation brought him from a quiet south-east London childhood, via a degree in sociology and economics at Bristol University, to a job in stockbroking. Six years in the City of London evidently acted as an aversion therapy. The gut dislike of financial markets Hutton developed there found its rationalisation in an MBA degree at Insead, the international business school outside Paris.
The degree turned him from financier to journalist and intellectual. He has a visiting professorship at Manchester University and is a governor of the London School of Economics. He is editing a book on globalisation with Anthony Giddens, the British left's other intellectual guru.
Perhaps the Observer experience shows that Hutton is cut out to be a thinker rather than a doer. But if the BBC job does elude him, there are consolations. He chairs the Commission on NHS Accountability. He is on the Design Council's Millennium Commission. Without doubt his name will appear on future lists. Agree with him or not, Will Hutton has, at the age of 49, accomplished more than many thinkers and even some doers achieve in a lifetime.
Diane Coyle is economics editor of the "Independent"
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