Publisher's Synopsis
The British feel insecure, their sense of national identity is uncertain and their belief in national decline remains stubbornly intact. The natural connection between economic growth and individual well-being has broken down.;Britain's current state of high anxiety is conventionally attributed to job losses and unexpectedly weak house prices. This book argues that there is a deeper malaise which reflects a climate of unrestrained individualism. Having thrown off militant trade unionists of the corporatist 1970s, Anglo-Saxon capitalism has fallen hostage to aggressive managers, hungry for share options and bent on takeovers, for whom dividends take precedence over jobs. This lack of restraint reflects a hole in the heart of the system. The anonymous investment institutions that control #500 billion of the nation's savings are failing to exercise responsible ownership. Privatization, the defining policy of Margaret Thatcher's capitalist counter-revolution, has substituted pension fund bureaucrats for Whitehall bureaucrats.;The rising cost of joblessness and a decline in social cohesion are contributing to a fiscal crisis of the state. Unprecedented levels of social security spending fail to prevent homelessness, crime and want. Growing numbers feel excluded from worthwhile participation in this unbalanced society.;In an age of insecurity Tony Blair's New Labour has stumbled on a remedy: the stakeholder society. It is an idea with great political resonance, but as yet little substance, at least in Britain. This volume shows that elements of the stakeholder philosophy can be employed to legitimize Anglo-Saxon capitalism, restrain the excesses of the takeover culture and encourage firms to provide more stable employment. But it will not succeed, Plender argues, unless it takes a distinctively British form and remains free from the constraints of a single European currency.;John Plender is the author of "That's the Way the Money Goes" and "The Square Mile".
