The First Way

I am an avid Guardian reader: I like it when it is insightful and right (Andrew Rawnsley, Marcel Berlins) and I like it when it is barking and wrong (Polly Toynbee et al.). The bits I don’t like are when it is unthinking, and there’s a cracking example in Sunday’s Observer.

Will Hutton has been on some Pope’s committee, and he is anxious that you should know it: 'What I told the Pope about how to shape the new capitalism’ is the title, and in case our conviction might waver on what a life changing event this has been for His Holiness we are reminded ‘Rather, it was [Benedict’s] opportunity to .... listen to what we had to say on the great issues he confronts.’ And ‘I was invited to the Vatican ..... to give my thoughts on what is happening in contemporary capitalism’.

But these thoughts are, unfortunately for the Holy See, just the empty headed tosh he has been spewing out for years. Once you have got over the arrogance you are plunged into a whole new world of murky thinking. Hutton is the author of Tony Blair’s short-lived ‘third way’: we hate capitalism but like business. Business must be allowed to make profits, but, hey, not too much. ‘[Catholics] want decent wages; more autonomy and dignity at work; they want the rich to accept obligations to promote the common good; firms to recognise that there is only any morality to profit making if it is as a consequence of delivering a declared economic purpose - to manufacture a great car, build a safe plane or whatever.’

But this is the nub. People do go into business to make money. Hutton quotes Unilever, Boeing and Sony as having some higher moral purpose. My guess is the Lever brothers, and Messrs Boeing and Ibaru of Sony started out wanting to feed their families. That is quite healthy. Of course their mission statements are written in Huttonish Doublespeak about promoting social welfare but that is just the zeitgeist. All three companies have gone to extraordinary lengths to beat the competition and keep their costs down: that is why they are successful.

The Pope will easily understand that it would be very nice if someone started a bank in order to feed the poor, but equally that the bank would fail. The point Hutton misses is this: that although he lumps them together in his addle-pated Blairite way there is a huge difference between overtaxing and regulating companies in some spurious attempt at morality and, in his words ‘the rich to accept obligations to promote the common good’. The first is a recipe for poverty. The second involves companies trading freely and the people who have profited from them giving their wealth freely. The Pope will not need Mr Hutton’s help to understand that: it is called charity. He probably calls it ‘the first way’.