Too often, the world of party politics and the world in which most people live are too different. Party politics tells me that, as a Labour councillor, I should not like a book by David Cameron’s former special adviser. But the real world tells me that there is much, much more to like in More Human than there is to reject.
We do not have to agree with Steve Hilton’s call for more private schools along the lines of one he saw in Lagos in order to agree with his view that ‘if you work full-time, you should be paid enough to live on – end of story’. And we do not have to agree that we need lots of small, competing hospitals to agree with his assessment that the ‘cause of the discontent that people feel with business today, the underlying reason for all the specific complaints, is the concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands.’
Although he might be more sceptical of the big state than most Labourites, he does not hold back on criticising other bigs – big energy, big business, big food and big pharma all come in for a pen-lashing. Some of the things he says would sound radical, even from a Labour writer. ‘The way in which big businesses in most severely uncompetitive industries capture the levers of power and use them to serve their commercial ends, rather than fairly competing in the marketplace like real businesses, is one of their hallmarks.’ Predators versus producers, anyone? His call for government to regulate businesses that are deemed to be too big to fail as if they were part of the public sector, and therefore to pay civil servant rates to their directors, certainly raised a smile and a nod from me. The chief executives of Tesco and HSBC probably see things a little differently.
In fact, the more I read, the more I came to see the challenge that Hilton lays down as more of a test for Labour than for his own party. Running through More Human is the need for decisions to be made, at worst, close to the people affected by them and, at best, by those very people. That applies whether the decisions are made by a government minister, a councillor, a doctor, a headteacher or a corporate executive. A Labour person would call this co-operatism – and this is the test for us. Can we ignore the centralising record of the government which Hilton served, and live up to his ideal? Can we do as Hilton says, and not as he did?
If we cannot, then the distance between the governors and the governed will continue to grow, and with it the contempt in which politicians are held. Hilton’s own party will not be the one to implement his ideas. Its rhetoric may be localist, but its policies have taken power and influence away from people. We do not have to do the same. We must show that we understand that people do not want redistribution of money if we do not also redistribute power. We have to take power back from the public sector and the private sector – in order to give it away. The Hilton Test is one for all parties, but it is Labour which must pass it.
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Mark Rusling is a councillor in the London borough of Waltham Forest
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More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First
By Steve Hilton
WH Allen | 384pp | £18.99