Sir Samuel Brittan has long been a national institution. As economics editor of the Observer in the early 1960s and the principal economic commentator on the Financial Times from 1966 to his retirement in 1998, he wrote an influential weekly newspaper column for almost 40 years. He still contributes to the Financial Times, often to great effect. Consistent themes in his writing have been support for free markets over state planning, and the advocacy of open- ness towards other countries in trade, investment and migration.
He has managed to keep his own party-political preferences shrouded in enough uncertainty to have influenced all three main parties. Although probably closest to the Conservatives, his work undoubtedly played a critical role in the 1970s and 1980s in moving young and open-minded left-wingers towards the doctrines now described as ‘New Labour’. By helping to persuade the leaders of British opinion that the free market is the best form of economic organisation yet devised, he has been an immense force for good. Brittan can fairly claim to be the George Orwell of British post-war financial journalism.
But Brittan has wanted to be something more than a superb commentator. His ambitions emerge from the titles of his 11 previously published books, which included Capitalism and the Permissive Society, A Restatement of Economic Liberalism, The Economic Consequences of Democracy, The Role and Limits of Government and Capitalism with a Human Face. One might expect these volumes to consist of heavyweight and original arguments drawn together in a consecutive text, in which the later chapters build on the earlier and the points made in every chapter contribute to the demonstration of the conclusions.
But the books were not like that at all. Instead they were collections of pieces of various kinds, all interesting, lively and worth reading, but rather miscellaneous and occasional. For the many thousands of his readers who were hoping for a major work of lasting value, they were, quite frankly, disappointing. Brittan’s collections can claim to be more substantial than high-quality journalism, but they are not major contributions to economic thought or political philosophy.
The latest offering, the twelfth of his books, is presented more modestly. Against the Flow: Reflections of an Individualist makes no pretence to being a grand argument about fundamental subjects. It consists of 68 pieces written between November 1999 and late 2004, with an average length of under 3,000 words. They are even more diverse than the previous collections, ranging from pen-portraits of figures like Friedman and Keynes to a speech on ‘Ethics, religion and humbug’ to the Oxford University Jewish Society.
As usual, Brittan writes well. Every piece is thought-provoking and accessible to non-specialists, even when he is reporting on relatively technical debates in macro- economics. But the form of the book does not flatter its author. When a columnist compiles a large number of recent articles, he ought, as far as possible, to remove inconsistencies between them and to avoid repeating himself. On these counts Against the Flow is unsatisfactory. The problems are at their worst in the opening sections on international terrorism and the arms trade which seem to be intended as the book’s emotional core.
Brittan describes himself as ‘a neo- pacifist’. Nevertheless, part one is dominated by calls for strong military action by the West and particularly by the USA to deal with Islamic terrorism. The first piece is a Financial Times column of 27 September 2001, written in response to the events of 11 September, which includes the tough-sounding statement, ‘At this point of danger we cannot be too squeamish in our choice of allies.’ The second piece, from 1 August 2002, criticises ‘the appeasing and temporising alternatives enunciated in European Union circles’ and again notes, ‘One cannot choose one’s allies.’ But only a few pages later a quite different sentiment appears. Brittan attacks Western leaders involved in ‘a dizzying successive embrace of rival dictatorships ranging from China to Iraq, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia’ and wonders why Tony Blair should have ‘to go looking for common ground with every unattractive Middle Eastern dictator’. So are we to be squeamish in our choice of allies or not? It just isn’t clear.
Faced with a hard argument, Brittan too often relies on bluster to find his way out. Despite the references to leading philosophers, he does not have an intellectually coherent line on international relations. For most of the time he is an economic liberal, and makes numerous pleas for the free flow of goods, services, people, ideas and capital across borders. But the attitude of universal benevolence changes when he comes to the awkward subjects of Arabs and the Middle East. On 8 November 2001 he ran a Financial Times column under the title ‘An exit from the Middle East’, the main point of which was to advocate ending the industrial nations’ dependence on oil from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. It recommended, in essence, that ‘the Middle East’ should be cut out of the international trading system. So the free flow of goods, services and so on is fine with Latin America, India, China and so on, but it is not fine with Arabs. The article is placed here between pieces carrying titles like ‘This is not a time for Boy Scouts’ and ‘An ethical foreign policy?’, which include statements about the folly of interfering in other nations’ domestic policies. Brittan shows no awareness of self-contradiction.
And what, one might ask, is a ‘neo- pacifist’? How does a neo-pacifist differ from a plain vanilla pacifist? For a definition one has to go back to Brittan’s 1973 Capitalism and the Permissive Society, which features a paper he wrote, as a young man of 23, in the aftermath of the Suez crisis. According to that paper, neo-pacifism
Yet“holds that the defence of national interests … is [not] a sufficient ground for murder and the break-up of private lives involved in a major war [but] does not necessarily imply that every military action has always been unjustified.
Brittan should have been told years ago that these remarks provide no clear guide to action. Is your reviewer alone in regarding them as a dreadful muddle?“for somebody holding such views, the best tactics would be to act as if he were in fact prepared in the last resort to preserve national interests and institutions.
Because Against the Flow consists of a sequence of individual pieces, it is not surprising that some of the references occur more than once, and George Kennan, Richard Cobden and Herbert Butterfield are undoubtedly good guys whose names deserve to be put up in lights. But is it a sign of competent editing that they appear, in more or less the same general context, with more or less the same surrounding phrases, on page 14, page 16 and page 29? (Incidentally, the same names were invoked on a number of occasions, again in a similar context, with similar surrounding phrases, in Capitalism and the Permissive Society over 30 years ago.)
Once again Brittan has not delivered the big, magisterial book that seemed to be promised. He has made a wonderful contribution to the debates on UK economic policy, but his recent output has ranged too widely and become too emotional. The work of every journalist, even journalists as outstanding as George Orwell and Samuel Brittan, is uneven. Their reputations are strengthened when they show an awareness of this unevenness.