Publisher's Synopsis
THE STATE WE'RE IN, Will Hutton's explosive analysis of British society, was the biggest selling politico-economic work since the Second World War. Now, as the world realigns itself in the wake of the September 11th atrocities, Hutton turns his attention to the global picture, and the ways in which the new world should be ordered. To understand the global economy, Hutton argues, one must first understand the United States. Over the past thirty years there, the forces of conservatism have achieved such supremacy as to reduce liberalism to a term of abuse. He lays bare modern America for what it is: a country of inequality in risk, opportunity and income, where 1% of the population owns 38% of the wealth, and 19% live in terrible poverty. And whilst American ideas dominated the latter part of the twentieth century, Hutton argues that the underpinning of the twenty-first must come from Europe. It is time for Britain to stop vacillating between two cultures and make common cause with its continental partners - to reject the conservative orthodoxy in favour of the shared European beliefs of obligations, rights and fairness.
