Jeremy Hunt’s glib new book dodges the big questions

No, not Keir Starmer, but Jeremy Hunt, whose new book Can We Be Rich Again? – if it sounds familiar, it’s because his Can We Be Great Again? came out last year – sets out what the former chancellor woulda, coulda, shoulda achieved, had the rusty machinery of the British state, political expediency and his boss’s caution not prevented him. 

Hunt is, fundamentally, a businessman. The people he most admires struck out alone and built enviable companies on the strength of their audacity and business acumen. “Screw it, let’s do it”, he concludes the book, quoting Richard Branson. That may explain why he is completely unashamed of the decision the Labour Party most loathes him for – cutting National Insurance by 2p as the election approached, making Starmer’s promise not to raise taxes on working people even harder to stick to.

And why not, he might say? Labour didn’t have to stick to the tax system he left them. In business, you undercut your rivals to win their customers. If Labour chose to be never knowingly undersold, John Lewis-style, that was their decision. In hindsight, Hunt says would have liked to abolish employees’ NI altogether and raised the basic rate of income tax to 25p, but that “would have meant higher bills for pensioners ahead of an election”.

The same winner-takes-all mentality is on display when he writes about the junior doctors’ strike, which he viewed as a battle of wills between himself and the junior doctors’ leader at the British Medical Association. One of them had to lose, apparently. 

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The irony is that a number of the steps Hunt wanted to take were at least partially implemented by the Starmer government, including planning and pension reforms. Hunt cares about how hard it is to build things, and explains why in language a 12-year-old could understand. Can We Be Rich Again? is more Daily Mail business page than John Maynard Keynes. He includes many very simple charts. It reads rather like a business plan.

Hunt has a passionate determination to pay down Covid-era debt, rightly pointing out how much tax is currently spent on servicing interest payments. But ultimately, as the businessman he is, he believes cutting corporation and income taxes is what will unleash British entrepreneurship and make the country grow. 

He also wants to invest in nuclear power, a notoriously expensive form of energy. Like Andy Burnham, he is keen on devolving fiscal power to regions. So what is he ready to cut to achieve these things?

Not much. The proposition, as you may have guessed, is that more growth will lead to a higher tax take, which will fund the benefits and NHS improvements that will in turn get more people back into work. What about, say, pensions? Surely when economic growth and incentivising people to work harder is the overwhelming priority, the triple lock needs to be reconsidered? We don’t know, because that tough question – like who should pay for social care and the right level of immigration – is not on the Hunt agenda. 

Immigration gets just a couple of paragraphs, in which he says that immigrants can increase pressure on housing and benefits systems and that, ideally, Britons would take these jobs instead. Perhaps such a controversial and complex topic is beyond the scope of this book, given how short it is. 

He has another one on the way, which will be about making Whitehall more efficient and getting things done faster. But you suspect that he would just rather not grapple with all the trade-offs it requires. (For that, I recommend Alan Manning’s Why Immigration Policy is Hard). The buccaneering businessman will push through all that. 

But although Hunt would visibly rather think about people who make money or will do so in the future, managing the country also means looking after the old, the very poor, and the chronically sick. Indeed, doing so properly and compassionately means that people who would otherwise have been their unpaid carers can go out to work. Not everyone, sadly, can respond to rational incentives, but the first step to dealing with that fact is to acknowledge it.

Hunt advocates treatment over benefits for people with less serious mental health or músculo-skeletal conditions. Easy to say, undoubtedly desirable, and harder to implement without considerable investment in the NHS. He also wants the government to cap the budget for working-age welfare – and hope, presumably, that there is no recession.

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His educational hero is ultra-strict headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh. No one disputes her school’s excellent results. Hunt believes children with special needs thrive in hardline academies where whispering in a corridor is punished: Birbalsingh told him so. He might want to listen to other voices, too. 

He has regrets. He wanted to spend heavily on childcare in order to get more women into work, but Sunak vetoed it. He would also have made substantial cuts to the benefit system to discourage mental health claims, but ran out of time. 

Now, at 59, he must know his time in frontline politics is probably over. And Can We Be Rich Again? feels dated: it is a broadly right wing prescription for growth in a country where the Conservatives have been sidelined by the left and the far right. A number of the suggestions are sensible and pragmatic. But it is too broad, too short and ultimately too glib to convince.

Can We Be Rich Again? by Jeremy Hunt is published by Curtis Brown