About

This is an urgent book about the state of Britain in the 2020s, from leading journalist and bestselling author Will Hutton.Rarely has a country seen as many interlinked crises as Britain is now enduring: a turbulent economy, rising living costs, an increasingly divided society, and the looming break-up of the United Kingdom.Hutton argues that it is the absolute dominance of a neoliberal consensus that has broken Britain, and that we need a new economic, social and political settlement if the country is not to become even poorer and more irrelevant.This talk examines the failures of his view of what is a right-wing ideology that has dominated Britain for an entire generation. Hutton exposes a pattern of minority leadership marked by lies and corruption, upheld by a broken first-past-the-post electoral system. A new kind of politics is urgently needed, one that harnesses the power of the collective to transform our economy, leadership and society for the better.Writing more than two decades on from his generation-defining The State We're In, which has sold a third of a million copies, Hutton once again captures Britain's anxieties and, more hopefully, its capacity for change.Will Hutton is a political economist, author, think tank and academic leader and columnist. He is currently President of the Academy of Social Sciences (since 2021) regular columnist for the Observer (since 1996) and co-chairs the Purposeful Company (since 2015) – a think tank who argues that companies’ intrinsic purpose should drive their strategy, values and ultimately profit. He also chairs the advisory board of the Fairness Foundation, is trustee of the National Institure for Economic and Social Research, a member of the Progressive Economic Forum and editorial advisory board of Prospect magazine.
His now fifty year career spans a period in the City as an investment banker, the Economics editorship of the Guardian and BBC2 Newsnight , the editorship of the Observer, the chief executive of the Work Foundation and Principal of Hertford College Oxford. Along the way he has won awards for his journalism and as a thought leader in Human Resources.
A Q&A Session will follow.