Vol. 17 No. 5 · 9 March 1995
pages 13-14 | 3465 words
Megalo
R.W. Johnson
- The State We’re In by Will Hutton
Cape, 352 pp, £16.99, January 1995, ISBN 0 224 03688 2
Will Hutton, the Guardian’s economics editor, has produced a book which is part show-biz – it carries a passionate puff from Ian McEwan on the front cover and leapt straight into the bestseller list – and part political event: it clearly aims to provide a sweeping economic and political platform for Labour, has been elaborated with the help of Tony Blair’s adviser, David Miliband, and sees Blair’s election as leader as an epochal event, finally settling Labour’s commitment to social democracy. All of which sounds very much as if Hutton hopes to become a key adviser in a future Blair administration, though the Tories may well want to know how much of the book really represents Labour policy. The State We’re In will almost certainly be a powerfully influential book among Labour’s élite, but many of its positions – particularly its out-and-out republicanism – are considerably bolder than any Labour’s leadership is likely to own up to.
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Letters
Vol. 17 No. 6 · 23 March 1995
From Anthony Walter
Enjoyed R.W. Johnson’s piece on Will Hutton’s phillipic The State We’re in (LRB, 9 March). There’s a splendid deadpan joke in the way Cape have priced this searing indictment of economic wishful thinking at a rosetinted £16.99. Compare Heinemann flogging Michael Ridpath’s thriller Free to Trade for a macho, no-bullshit £10, rather than a moron-enticing £9.99.
Anthony Walter
London N16
Vol. 17 No. 9 · 11 May 1995
From Martin Taylor
R.W. Johnson’s review of Will Hutton’s book, The State We’re In (LRB, 9 March), shows how ill-informed he and Mr Hutton are about our ownership of British Ever Ready. Johnson says that having bought Ever Ready in 1982 we sold its European division to its main competitor Duracell, pushed up prices, surrendered market share and after ten years sold the remaining shell of a company to another competitor. This was alleged to be ‘nothing but vandalism’. The facts are these. We acquired British Ever Ready in 1982 for £95 million, at a time when its market share was in free fall and it had seen its profits halve in a five-year period. We and the management of Ever Ready rescued the company and its capacity to continue as the only significant UK producer of dry-cell batteries. We did indeed sell the overseas loss-makers, which were rapidly bringing the company towards bankruptcy.
Ever Ready was eventually sold to Ralston Purina, the owner of the Eveready battery business in the United States, for £132 million (hardly the price for a ‘shell’), thus providing a vastly improved business with another good home. The business was hardly ‘in decline’ or ‘behind the times’. The reference to a ‘pretty thin infrastructure’ is more a comment on Ralston’s own management structure than that of Ever Ready.
The rescue of Ever Ready gave improved value to Hanson shareholders, who not only retained the £132 million proceeds but also remained owners of two other first-class businesses – Eveready South Africa and Crabtree, which were both part of the Ever Ready business acquired in 1982. These two businesses alone now earn three times the pretax profits of the whole of British Ever Ready at the time we acquired it.
Martin Taylor
Vice-Chairman, Hanson
