I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking around the subject and nature of Trust, as we prepare to launch the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer in London and in Davos this week.
It will come as no surprise to many to learn that – as with the interim Barometer, published in the summer of 2009 – the nature and levers of Trust are themselves contextualized by the continued shift from a shareholder to stakeholder society. And it was in this vein that I re-visited Will Hutton’s seminal 1995 work ‘The State We’re In’ and its closing chapter and paragraphs on Stakeholder Capitalism.
Hutton’s key themes were/ are not new to Britain: “They were at the heart of Keynes’ and Beveridge’s position and before them of Paine’s – but they have been buried by twentieth-century socialism and New Right Conservatism”. The truth is that a further fifteen years of political paralysis and flip-flopping, together with unfettered regulation and a woeful lack of institutional reform, has taken an already bad situation to the brink of genuine catastrophe. Yet Hutton’s suggested remedies remain ones of pragmatism and sense:
….”a written constitution; the democratization of civil society; the republicanisation of finance; the recognition that the market economy has to be managed and regulated, both at home and abroad; the upholding of a welfare state that incorporates social citizenship; the construction of stable financial order beyond the nation state”.
Common Good – whether used in its truest, utilitarian sense or as a mere catch-all for the direction in which a civil society should be heading, is the end beneficiary of the harnessing of these principles. We would all have done well to listen then. The need to listen – and act – for the common good is all the more urgent now.
Hutton’s 1995 view gave an intellectual framework and coherence to Blairism – and the enduring disappointment of the Blair years remains the failure to initiate the very institutional/ constitutional reform that would have recognized a more comprehensive role for active citizenship. The difficulties in delivering philosophical and attitudinal change instead gave way to increased structural imposition – more tables, more targets, more centralized bureaucracy. Cameron’s quiet motto appears to be ‘Blairism, better managed’ – but whoever emerges as Prime Minster later this year should sensibly re-visit the central tenets of Stakeholder Capitalism. In a post-Financial Crisis, post-Copenhagen world, our new PM should think long and hard about how to properly liberate the most powerful reforming force of all – we, the people.
