Good Business Steve Hilton and Giles Gibbons Texere, 264pp, £17.99 ISBN 1587991187

Steve Hilton runs a company dedicated to helping businesses find their true inner souls. Naomi Klein got it wrong, he thinks. Noreena Hertz got it wrong. Anti-globalisation protesters and proselytisers are woefully mistaken. Business, he writes, produces not just wealth, but also happiness and goodness.

Hilton argues that the only problem with "corporate social responsibility" (CSR) - the boardroom buzz phrase of the past decade - is that it is too timid. Ever since the anti-globalisation protests in Seattle, in 1999, companies have allowed themselves, wrongly, to be pushed on to the back foot. Instead of responding to protests about sweatshop labour or environmental pollution with specific poverty-reduction projects or clean-up operations, they should be far more active in proclaiming their ethical virtue.

"It's not enough to change your company," writes Hilton. "You should use your company to change the world." So CSR should transform itself into CSL - "corporate social leadership". This, as you may already have gathered, is not a platitude-free zone.

How can this transformation be achieved? Well, companies should be the prime movers in projects such as literacy drives, anti-Aids campaigns and inner-city regeneration. Not only are they better equipped financially and professionally than the public sector, they are more in tune with what the public, especially youth, wants.

Hilton offers some interesting examples: air miles, for instance, could become "green miles", with which airline customers would win bicycling holidays or ecotourism trips. He also calls for carbon-neutral air flights and praises Lord Browne, the present chief executive of BP (or rather, to follow the latest marketing wheeze, bp) as a "businessman of quite exceptional calibre, demonstrating remarkable vision and leadership", unlike those nasty people over the pond at ExxonMobil.

Leaving aside the issue of Browne's much-publicised recent pay rise, when was the last time any NS reader went to the cinema and failed to hear others in the audience giggle at the latest Shell or BP advert? This is not lazy cynicism: it is healthy scepticism. It will take more than the odd trip to the movies to convince people that CSR, or CSL, or whatever Hilton wants to call it, is anything more than a marketing gimmick, an act of self-preservation or response to the small but vocal influence of the ethical consumer.

That is not to say that every CSR scheme is a waste of space. No two companies' ethical records are the same; the better ones are worthy of distinction. But even the best devote a minuscule percentage of their turnover to such projects - far smaller than the publicity might suggest.

On the subject of motive, Hilton entreats us to give companies the benefit of the doubt. "Surely through their contribution to pensions, insurance and tax revenues, companies are acting in the interests of wider society if they maximise their profits?" His question is rhetorical: he offers no convincing answers.

A whole industry has been created around the globalisation debate. Good Business is worth having as an antidote to the mass of anti-corporatist books. But it will take far more than this book, however entertaining, to make the case for the essential goodness of the global brand and his maker.

Hilton is a charismatic figure in Soho. He was a key operator in the Conservatives' advertising campaigns of the early 1990s - before, that is, he realised that the fusty no-hopers of Central Office were not where it was at. In truth, CSR and its bandwagon are perfect for new Labour. "The 21st-century company will be different," Hilton quotes Tony Blair as saying. "Many of Britain's best-known companies are already redefining traditional perceptions of the role of the corporation. They are recognising that every customer is part of a community and that social responsibility is not an optional extra."

If only it were that simple.

John Kampfner is NS political editor

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