A new book by Will Hutton is always to be welcomed, and this morning's Observer carries a long extract from his new one, Them and Us. This is all I've read so far and I'm struck, as ever, by the passion of his writing.

Of course, it's not difficult to be outraged and passionate at present. The first paragraph of the extract sums it up neatly:

The British are a lost tribe – disoriented, brooding and suspicious.
They have lived through the biggest bank bail-out in history and the
deepest recession since the 1930s, and they are now being warned that
they face a decade of unparalleled public and private austerity. Yet
only a few years earlier their political and business leaders were
congratulating themselves on creating a new economic alchemy of unbroken
growth based on financial services, open markets and a seemingly
unending credit and property boom. As we know now, that was a false
prospectus. All that had been created was a bubble economy and society.
Yet while the country is now exhorted to tighten its belt and pay off
its debts, those who created the crisis — the country's CEOs and
bankers, still living on Planet Extravagance, not to mention mainstream
politicians — all want to get back to “business as usual”: the world of
1997 to 2007.

Indeed.

I was also struck, over my porridge this morning (it is now autumn, after all), by how depressingly little the issues have changed since Will's bestseller, The State We're In, was published in 1995. It starts: “The British are accustomed to success. This is theworld's oldest democracy. Britain built an empire, launched the Industrial Revolution and was on the winning side in the 20th century's two world wars. … Yet in the last decade of the 20th century the record of success is tarnished. … Even its unique economic asset, the City of London, is sullied by malpractice and a reputation for commercial misjudgement.”

The ills diagnosed then – short termism, the social scars of entrenched inequality and privilege, and a political system not up to the challenges  – are still with us, but worse than ever. I think Them and Us will repay reading in tandem with The State We're In. Will was right in 1995, and I suspect he's still right in 2010.