Dr Hunt’s cure for the British malaise

Jeremy Hunt was born to be a top Tory. Son of an Admiral and educated at Charterhouse (favourite posh school for the politically ambitious including Dick Taverne, Douglas Carswell and the BBC’s Nick Robinson, who at Oxford was chairman of the Conservative Association), Hunt has the charm, good manners and friendliness seldom found in the Tories who have defected to Reform.

He writes serious, readable and mercifully short  books on politics. Yet he has a political killer’s instinct. Before the 2024 election Hunt as Chancellor reduced employees’ National Insurance twice, as a crude tax bribe for voters. It was pointless as the Tories were heading for wipe-out. It did, however, mean that the incoming Labour government’s income was reduced by £22 billion.

Sir Keir Starmer is a lawyer, not an economist nor a politician. He could have denounced Hunt’s manoeuvre and restored the cut. But if Hunt was cunning, Labour were cack-handed and walked into his trap.  To pay for Hunt’s £22 billion reduction in government income, Labour cut help for older people keeping warm in the winter and reduced the aid budget. Thus began the loss of support, culminating in Labour’s electoral débâcle in England, Scotland and Wales.

Sir Jeremy (as he now is)is a very rich man who has kindly written a book for the rest of us asking Can We Be Rich Again?’His answer is: “Yes.” Surprisingly, the core message of his book is that Europe does it better. He urges his fellow MPs to adopt French-style planning to build more houses, copy Scandinavia to get more people into work by reviving apprenticeships, which were largely abolished by Margaret Thatcher and not restored by any government Jeremy Hunt has been in or lived under since.

He advocates Swiss style regional government with full tax-raising powers, importing German-style vocational training, Australian pension reforms, and Dutch locally elected mayors with power to fund local infrastructure projects.

Hunt pays lip service to Trump’s America, citing a couple of states which have posted good growth. But growth for whom? Hunt has the intellectual honesty to  admit that the levels of poverty, child exploitation, crime, poor health outcomes, dependence on cheap immigrant labour to replace unionised jobs in America are not welcome in or exportable to his own country or indeed anywhere in Europe.

By now the evidence is in. Breaking so many trade links with Europe — the outcome of  decades of Tory, later Reform and Restore hostility to sharing economic and labour market policies with best practice in our near neighbours — has been a failure.

I have not read a Tory so enthusiastic for Europe in decades. So will Jeremy Hunt be the first Tory to break ranks with the Farage-Badenoch hostility to reconnecting with our European neighbours, or the rigid Starmer red lines based on Boris Johnson’s rejection of the European core values first outlined in the Treaty of Rome 75 years ago?

Naturally as a product of post-Thatcher Toryism Sir Jeremy cannot bring himself to admit that partnership, not distance and rejection of better economic practice in many EU nations, should be re-examined.

In 2025 goods exports from the UK were $485 bn, from Germany $1.77 trillion, from France $668 bn, from Italy $726. Britain’s declining number of elderly anti-Europeans who defend the trade and people rupture with Europe point to the glorious profits made by the City selling its financial engineering products. But last year these brought in just £166 bn for the UK.

The City’s genius lies in on-line financial engineering, including the lucrative new crypto and bitcoin currency manipulations undertaken by clever Brits in remote corners of the world where there is little financial supervision. Many scams emanating from these places are based on fraudsters conning individuals, usually over the phone, to invest in money growth products which to begin with show quick big profits, leading to serious money transfers and then the disappearance of the fraudster. Nearly all are based on crypto.

This non-regulated crypto world appears as a profit in the post-Brexit UK accounts, but does nothing to help growth outside the City as the rest of Britain, cut off from its largest markets, becomes poorer and poorer. Jeremy Hunt is right to urge British policymakers to copy best practice in Europe. Whether he will sell many copies of his book making these arguments to Tory MPs — as their party under Kemi Badenoch seeks to narrow the distance with Nigel Farage’s Reform and Rupert Lowe’s Restore party, both based on so-called “remigration” — remains to be seen.

But Andy Burnham’s approach to running Greater Manchester seems straight out of the Hunt playbook. So if the Labour candidate for Makerfield does return to the Commons and becomes leader of the Labour Party, he could do worse on the basis of Hunt’s book than offer the patrician Tory a job in the next Labour government.

Jeremy Hunt: Can We Be Rich Again: The Surprising Potential of Britain’s Economy (Swift Books £25).

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