When the FT, CBI and Spectator all think Labour had a good conference in Liverpool then either they did, or fake news has become universal. I am inclined to the first view. Corbyn was confident. McDonnell mastered the brief. Starmer played the audience. Policy announcements had a purpose, even if they need polishing. It feels like Labour does have a momentum (pun intended). And whilst there is much about which I would wish for refinement, that is good news.
There is bad news too. I remain unconvinced by Labour on Brexit. The position it holds is too obviously about papering over its cracks. Its merit is only that it is doing so better than the Tories.
And Labour's position on Scotland remains so antagonistic that its chances of power are greatly diminished. That really does not make sense.
But there is an area I want to note. Carolyn Fairbairn, CBI Director-General, said yesterday:
Much of Labour's vision for a more sustainable and fair country is absolutely right. Business not only supports it but holds many of the keys to making it a reality.
From onshore power to affordable childcare, the Labour leader's speech echoes calls from firms for more action on climate change and to unlock productivity.
But then she added:
But this will only happen if Labour invites business into the tent.
So here's the question: whose tent is it?
First, let's be clear that the CBI is an employer's organisation. In other words, it's a management driven body. It does not represent the owners of capital.
Second, let's also note that the owners of capital have good reason to be concerned about the actions of managers in many companies, where it can be quite fairly asked if they really act in owners' best interests.
Third, this conflict has been resolved (supposedly) by adding more managers to boards and by giving management large stakes in their companies, without any obvious gain from their magnitude resulting.
So what are the CBI objecting to? In essence they don't like long share incentive schemes for managers that seriously dilute the earnings of the owners of capital being replicated in the case of those below the very upper echelons of management.
The CBI has to be careful here. It's argument, which has little evidential support, is that company managers work better, harder and in the greater interest of owners if their interests and those of the shareholders are aligned. But now they want to suggest that this would not hold true for the rest of the workforce. How can that be? I'd suggest it is not possible. Either the theory works (and the CBI subscribes to the view that it does) or it does not. And if it does worker and shareholder interest alignment will also work.
So, in fact, what the CBI is arguing is that employees must not share in the gains that have so far accrued to a tiny part of management. As arguments go that is extraordinarily weak. It does in fact look like nothing better than dissembling to disguise greed. They'd be wise to drop the ‘Labour anti-business' line when senior managers have spent the last thirty five years blatantly scrambling to grab a slug of the action for themselves. They should instead realise that Labour is actually endorsing their view that goal alignment is appropriate, but that it will work best when shared widely. It's the ‘shared widely' bit that the CBI resents. It's not endearing. No wonder Labour is on a roll.
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Interesting take on the role of the CBI.
Shepherds who have a taste for mutton. !
The aroma of burning flesh (Lamb kebabs, particularly) is pleasing to the CBI.
Agreed about the CBI.
Capitalism truly works when it delivers the highest amount of social welfare to the greatest amount of people.
Not to the smallest amount of people.
That is the difference between good capitalism and bad capitalism. And I’ve had enough of the latter – haven’t you?
PSR, up until fairly recently I would have agreed wholeheartedly but I’m becoming more and more convinced that Capitalism is becoming a truly busted flush. I’ve followed this blog for years and have always enjoyed your posts for the pure humanism that invariably shines through. I just struggle to see progress through micro manipulation and incremental change anymore. I really used to believe that we could bring it back in check but we’ve now passed so many warning signs. My fear is now that extremis will bring change that in execution and detail are nothing like we’d hope for. I’m basing this on two key areas:-
1. Modern Enclosures – in this I include the continued privatisation of once public spaces. Then there’s the acceleration of enclosing the greatest new public space, the internet. Yep, first they come for the nutjobs but think of Twitter, Facebook, Google and the algorithms they employ. Finally the rackets that are intellectual property and ‘trade’ agreements.
2. The Me Too Movement that involves us all – identity politics and all it has entailed has had me thinking a great deal about power structures, heirarchies and imbalances. There’s a bit of point 1 in here as well, look at how quickly and successfully the Occupy Movement was shut down and derailed. The one thing since strong unions that I felt actually scared TPTB. But overall it makes me think of the inherent financial violence of a Capitalist system. Yes the violence varies but only depending on how much the Capitalism is tempered not by the Capitalism itself. Everyone is indoctrinated to believe that hard work is the route to success and failure is personal and not systemic. Yet imagine, if you will, what it would look like if everyone toed the line. If every person worked as hard as they could and committed no crime and caused no waves. What’s the reward, what’s the payoff? As far as I can see we just keep the same pyramidical structure but with a generally better educated and behaved populace.
I suppose I could argue that a severely limited form of Capitalism could be ok, maybe keep it out of the essentials of living as far as possible. I have to recognise its success as an engine of technical progress. But the current price in well being, division and lack of stability is a steep one, and one that has grown steadily through my lifetime.
If I used Twitter and didn’t care about detracting from the extremely important MeToo I might be tempted to start a hashtag re experience financial fear/violence. That’s one the vast majority of the world could be included in.
Sorry bit down, keep up your type of posts, the word needs more positivity than I can offer right now.
Thanks for your perspective
I valued it
Alastair says:
“… Modern Enclosures — in this I include the continued privatisation of once public spaces. ”
A major creeping issue. Mostly under the radar. I quite agree and the privatisation of information through enhanced intellectual property rights is a worrying development. They’ll privatise the air we breathe when they’ve figured out how to meter it and bill it.
And you refer to the “inherent financial violence of a Capitalist system.”
YES !! People don’t see it, but it’s there….and it underpins so much of what we’re suffering from as a society.
We don’t beat people-up we oppress (and often ultimately ruin) them financially. Fixed period contracts you can’t stop paying; swingeing cancellation charges, daily charges from utilities whether you use their product or no; interest rate increases on borrowings which can only be avoided by clearing the entire balance…… and the list goes on and all ‘enshrined’ in a veneer of phoney ‘business practice laws’. Much of which is bluster and bluff.
For many the only recourse is to default and go underground. It’s not acceptable.
One of my Card issuers has sold my balance to another organisation. They clearly didn’t look below the triple A rated top sheets in that pile of waste paper.
Shredded paper makes good soil conditioner.
Interesting Andy, and glad you picked up on the violence within Capitalism as that’s the bit that really gets me. I suppose thank goodness we still lag behind the US, can you imagine being bankrupted, losing home, family, for getting ill or having an accident? Even better if you have student debt as that can never be discharged and boy have we accelerated away from free education.
I used to place freedom and democracy at the top but I’m now veering to a life devoid of fear or dread being of far greater import.
Alas Alastair!
Thank you for your warm words. Coming here helps me to cope with reality. You sound a bit peed off. Can’t say I blame you.
I note your points with interest.
‘Capitalism truly works when it delivers the highest amount of social welfare to the greatest amount of people’.
My view of capitalism above is a very stripped down version focussing on the current lack of distribution of output benefits through traditional means – wages, a healthy commons, public services and the like. I am focussing on the economic failure of current capitalism and its narrow (and narrowing) distributional effects.
Currently we have bad capitalism: I contend simply that we need better capitalism. I’m going to try to stick up for good capitalism.
Onto the factors you mention – are they particular to capitalism? Is violence (financial or otherwise) particular to capitalism? I’m not really sure here. Capitalism gets the blame either way because whether you are making staples or bullets – someone has to get paid and that is capitalism. You can lend money at reasonable rates or fleece the debtor (hurt them). Michael Hudson speaks of ancient world debt being solved by debt jubilees – where all debts were forgiven and the ledgers erased and started again. Oh for that form capitalism to arise now!
We had a go at Communism and that was pretty violent too by all accounts.
Was the work of Robert Owen in the New Lanarkshire Mills good capitalism or bad capitalism?
Could we say that capitalism is a tool – a way to do something or organising society to do things? But where it goes wrong is the politics and economics of how it is made to work – the context. Whose view of capitalism is at work? I’d like to see Richard’s view in action as he writes in ‘The Courageous State’ brought to life which (the more I read it) is what I would call ‘social capitalism’ (currently we have ‘anti-social capitalism’). Richard’s world is one where people are put first; the real world we inhabit values money over people. We now have a turbo charged Reagan/Thatcher form of capitalism.
One of the political contexts of capitalism I see these days is fascism – the intolerance of other modes of capitalism as well as others (anti-enlightenment). There can only be one way – TINA and all that. And that is a political problem – not necessarily a problem of capitalism alone.
I went through an anti-capitalist phase myself once but later began to see that there are different modes by which we can organise it that work better than they currently do (collectives for example – they exist even in the US). So rather than just do capitalism down as just one monolithic theory, we need a finer grained analysis to identify the good theories and the bad. The risks inherent in capitalism can be managed like all other risks if there is the will to do it. And it is so often political weakness (and weakness in the political economy) that negates the will.
In addition this is why I felt the Occupy Movement petered out. Not necessarily because it was purposefully side lined but because the politicians who could have embraced it are so inculcated into the idea that markets are so perfect that there they simply had no answers. There was no where left to go. A vacuum was left behind in 2008. There was shock and then anger but then people simply had to get back on with their (now) harder lives. I agree however that a major change could have happened and it did not.
So interesting stuff Alastair I’m with Yanis Varoufakis on this. We need to save capitalism and try to improve it if we can because it is that goal that is perhaps the most achievable now given the capture of our polity by finance and the benign (but frustrating) ignorance in the population about the alternatives (both forms of indoctrination BTW).
BTW I like the enclosure theme applied to privatisation. I get it.
#Me Too – not interested. But I have become very interested in people’s reactions to 2008 because I feel that they still should be very angry about it. Why are they not? It has to be the most important event of the early 21st Century. I have some theories I’m working on about that and maybe might have a go at mentioning them here when I’ve thought it through a bit more (it’s from reading Jordon Petersen).
Keep your pecker up kid!
Oh PSR, a great post and we probably vary via semantics more than reality, what you refer to as good Capitalism I would describe as partial Capitalism limited by other isms to stop it doing too much damage…but same result. I too have a lot of time for Yanis and think he speaks a lot of sense.
But, and it’s a big but, your closing bit, please, please, please take a longer harder look at Jordan Peterson. View some debunking/dissecting YT videos aimed at him, Rationality Rules does some good stuff here. Peterson is pure poison dressed up in word salad and a convincing air of academia and reasonableness.
You want to put a ‘…ism’ on the end of it, you can count me out.
I’m not interested.
Nils Pratley, the Guardian’s Finance Editor, is perhaps even more pointed in his criticism of the CBI:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2018/sep/26/big-business-should-look-in-mirror-before-damning-labour-plans
He also has a fully justified swipe at the Big 4 accountants. But he is pretty scathing, and for good reasons, about Labour’s proposed workers’ collective share-holding fund in firms employing more than 250 workers.
In addition, Labour’s ideas on democratic public ownership are woolly in the extreme:
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Democratic-public-ownership-consulation.pdf
and potentially self-defeating and counter-productive.
As for financing renationalisation, I can see how the current dividend stream is, and probably will continue to be, far in excess of the coupon on gilts – and that the increase in national debt will be matched by a corresponding increase in assets, but I fail to see how the current shareholders will be prepared to relinquish their shares in exchange for gilts without coercion.
I thought Nils was good
I agree, Labour has a lot more work to do and needs to bury some old hatchets to get some of it done
That’s the whole point isn’t it though? Workers won’t share in the gains – apart from a token £500. And any benefit from that would be offset by the value of the company going down (which would happen if someone takes 10% of it without any compensation).
I work for a well known retail company with a employee share ownership scheme. This Labour plan might give me £500 extra a year – no doubt taxable as well – but would effectively take away 10% of my shares in the company. So I would be a net loser.
And that’s before I take into account my pension – which is probably going to be more relevent for most people out there. Losing 10% would set me back far further than what few dividends I would get out of this Labour scheme.
Why not just call it what it is – a plan for a Labour government to take – sorry steal – 10% of all companies and then put their Momentum or Union thugs on the boards of those companies as well so they can control them even more.
I think your last line tells us all we need to know about your own rather unsavoury and selfish opinion of others, and discredits all you say
Grace says:
“Why not just call it what it is — a plan for a Labour government to take — sorry steal — 10% of all companies and then put their Momentum or Union thugs on the boards of those companies as well so they can control them even more.”
Well, at the very least it would put a different class of ‘thug’ into the boardroom and 10% is probably a modest ‘steal’ compared with current level of boardroom rip-off for no apparent value added.
You haven’t bothered to actually answer my questions. You have just made an ad hom attack. You obviously think yourself morally and intellectually superior to me – which is one reason I don’t want people like you in charge of anything.
You are clearly power hungry and are hoping to jump on the bandwagon and get yourself on to lots of company boards. That and you can’t admit to the obvious problems with this scheme.
What is unsavory is that Labour are telling us lies about their workers shares scheme. It is nothing of the sort. Do the workers get the shares? No – the government does. It is nothing more than a massive wealth and power grab.
Is it selfish to say that anyone who has a private pension – so millions of people – will lose out, and it will affect our retirements? Because Labour have decided to just take 10% of the value of any shares we own? Is it selfish to say that companies are likely to move abroad rather than give 10% to the government, so jobs will be cut and tax receipts will fall?
This is just another socialist policy of jealousy – take from people who don’t vote for us – no matter what the consequences – and give to those who do. Workers won’t get paid more because of this policy – if anything, it will be less.
What it is a massive tax grab from anyone who has worked hard, formed companies or saved for their retirement through a pension scheme.
Any Crow – company directors might get paid too much, but what they get paid is a fraction of what the government would be taking. I would also rather have a company board who are at least in some way tied to the fortunes of the company, rather than Union representatives who owe their allegiance to Labour, the Unions and the mob that supports them, and will just use the companies as political tools.
This is nothing about democratising companies – all Labour are trying to do is change one set of remote, unnaccountable people of power for their own – and I’m sure there will be just the same level of corruption and bad behaviour once Labour and their cronies are in charge.
Grace
You offered a selfish and unreasoned attack
I am sorry – but people don’t like them. If you had not realised it is time you did
I welcome constructive criticism. You did not offer it and you are not doing so now. All you are offering is diatribe. That’s not good enough. Either offer reasoned argument or please do not call in at my space.
Richard
Grace says:
“You haven’t bothered to actually answer my questions. You have just made an ad hom attack”
You understand how projection works as a psychological process I presume ?
Read what you have written and compare it with the tone of my comment.
Your posting to which I responded raised only one question; a rhetorical one. I try to resist the temptation to answer rhetorical questions.
Richard,
I own a company I set up nearly 20 years ago. We now have over 300 employees, many of who are shareholders, and a couple of the early employees now sit on the (admittedly small) board.
I still work for the company, and sometimes draw a salary, but mostly any money I receive is from dividends – from profits. When there are none I don’t get much if anything.
For many of the early years, I lived hand to mouth, when the company wasn’t doing well or making much money.
The government already takes about 40% of our net turnover through the various tax levied – income on the wages we pay, corporation tax, business rates and VAT to name the big ones.
Why should I just roll over and hand the government another 10% of the company, and then have a couple of union reps sitting on my board, so they can apply political pressure to anything they, or their Labour/Union overseers don’t agree with?
You know what is most likely to happen if this idea becomes policy? I will have to either split the company up or fire people to make sure we don’t get caught by it. it would certainly make growing the business any further much more difficult, so no new jobs would be created. If they try and clamp down on that further I will simply take the ownership of the company abroad – we already have a premises in Spain so that would be the logical thing for us.
I assume you will now accuse me of being some uncaring callous rich person, and lord your moral superiority over me. I’m not poor, but I’m no multi-millionaire either, and what I built has helped a lot of other people through the jobs it has created.
I’m just being realistic. This is a bad policy. Can’t you not see that? You don’t seem to engage with the actual arguments people have made against it. Why not?
With respect, you don’t pay VAT. Your customers do. If you don’t understand that, and the fact that your employees pay their taxes, and you just act as agent, then you really are not offering informed or even useful comment.
I have reservations about the policy – and I have offered suggestions for improvement already. It is not my creation. But I am deeply intolerant of baseless objections, and yours is just that.
Yes, my customers pay VAT, and my employees pay NI and income taxes – so I suppose we are the agent for those taxes. Business rates, NIC and Corporation tax are the main direct taxes we pay as a business.
But so what if we are an agent?
That doesn’t make what I said any less true. Those “indirect” taxes are still part of the business, and they can only be paid because of the turnover of the business – nothing to do with the profit it makes.
Having employees is a (necessary) cost to the business, but part of that cost is the amount those employees have then got to pay to the government in terms of tax and NI as well as the employers NIC the business itself has to directly make.
Every time we sell something, our only means of making a profit, the government takes 20% in VAT. Does it really matter if we pay it or our customer does? It is still a part of the tax take for government which is in part proportional to our turnover.
Net/Net, the exchequer is still takes a hefty percentage of our turnover every year, whether we make a profit or not. That percentage is not fixed, but it works out at roughly 40% a year – of our turnover (not our net profit before you go on).
Chase businesses away, by threatening to take 10% of them and fill their boards will political apparatchiks and you get less sales and jobs in the UK – which means less turnover and less taxes.
As an accountant and tax expert, you should understand this, surely?
If you have reservations about this policy why are you supporting it in your blogs, and why aren’t you able to accept any criticism of it, other than your own very luke warm criticism – which seems only to amount to “I could have done it better”.
?
I am a chartered accountant and director of businesses, as I have been for 35 years
I do not share your views
I bothered to undertsand tax
And I also bothered to value my employees too
I wonder why yours want to work for you? Have you ever thought how thye might regard your contempt for them?
You haven’t answered my questions. Actually you have simply avoided answering them and instead chosen to slander me.
I can see you are a director of companies – but I can’t seem to find any employees to any of the companies you ran. Most of them seem to be small companies with one or two directors as the only “employees”. How many employees did the largest company you ran have?
I also understand tax. Running your own business will do that to you. You haven’t been able to challenge the points I have made. Not 100% sure you do though.
You are slandering me by saying I have contempt for my workers. You literally have no idea yet you are making that claim. It is offensive and frankly typical example of the way left wingers like you view themselves as morally superior. Clearly a business owner who doesn’t vote Labour must by definition be an evil Tory capitalist who views his employees as dirt.
My employees seem to enjoy their jobs – given the length of service many of them have with us, by choice. Many are close family friends, and they are incredibly important to our business. They get paid before I do.
That doesn’t change the fact though that if Labour takes 10% of the business, then installs it’s little union commissars to report on us, and organise flying pickets whenever we do something that offends their juvenile political sensibilities, then the business will have to change. Maybe that means splitting it up to be under 250 employees, but knowing that those loopholes will likely close it will probably mean moving some of the business offshore, and job losses.
But by all means. Blame me and not what is a truly retarded policy.
Why should I want to engage with someone who calls his employees ‘commissars’?
I would avoid conversation with a person that obnoxious anywhere.
Please don’t call again
I didn’t call my employees commissars. You are dissembling again. Probably because you can’t actually deal with my arguments in anything other than a rude and derogatory manner. You certainly can’t come up with any rational explanation as to how the policy won’t cause all the problems I have mentioned – your best and only effort is to claim that productivity will improve. Which it might, but not enough to make up for the massive cost in value and jobs that the policy would also cause.
I did call the union people that would be placed on my board commissars. You do realize that Corbyn’s policy doesn’t put employees on the board – it puts “workers”, who happen to also have to be union members on the board. At no point do they say that it will be workers from the company – a very specific omission.
There is historical precedence for this. It’s exactly what the communists did in Bolshevik time. Those workers representatives quickly became commissars. If you were a student of history, you would also know why the Bolsheviks – meaning “the many” – called themselves that.
it was because there were so few of them, and they originally operated by taking over larger organizations from within.
Remind you of anything?
I wonder if you have ever heard the advice thatbwhen in a hole, stop digging? If not you should.
Labour us suggesting that your right to play God to 300 people be constrained.
You have supported their case most eloquently.
Grace, maybe you’ve done well out of the share scheme, but have you not noticed how the bosses, (directors & execs) have probably done even better, with their award of shares – to align their interests with those of shareholders (sic) – as many of them have pursued policies of short-term profits over long-term success through share-buybacks and other clever wheezes, such as trashing pension funds by moving all the risk onto the workers by ending final salary schemes and introducing precarious employment practices for workers, such as zero hours contracts. And that’s just the good companies. The vultures (aka Private Equity) leverage buyouts, raid the pension fund, sack workers or move production overseas, award themselves a one-off special dividend of millions (or more) and then when it goes belly up file for bankruptcy and start over again elsewhere.
It is a fact that the labour share of national income has been on an inexorable downward trend since the 1980’s. Even those Marxist fellow travellers the OECD, with the IMF and World Bank admit this is the case. https://www.oecd.org/g20/topics/employment-and-social-policy/The-Labour-Share-in-G20-Economies.pdf
I wonder whose share has increased?
Malcolm
You doth protest too much.
How come having workers interacting with company Boards has worked in Germany and Japan? And look at how healthy their economies have been compared to our own (and please don’t tell me about the Japanese economy having problems because of how their production lines are set up – Japan’s woes are due to finance – not the workers or their firms).
Why should it follow that the unions would want to take over a company ‘from within’? Your rather histrionic response has led you to give away all your prejudices. You’ve shown your hand.
You are yet another person who needs to so some reading and you should start with Tom Browns book ‘Tragedy & Challenge’ where he covers industrial relations between employees and firms in the UK and neither comes out looking good. His attack on finance in industry needs to be read too.
So things do not need to be the same again. If employees have more of a stake lets get the balance right this time. Lets put the sodding 1970s to bed eh, once and for all.
So lets also get rid of the class war that seems to dominate industrial relations in this country. My worry is exactly what you have demonstrated. That those like you at the top of company pyramid will just want to protect your position and continue to feel entitled to more.
And BTW – if earnings are lean and your income drops, why can you not sit around with your Board and fellow employees and discuss that issue. Why should you receive income in shares and then suffer a drop in income when demand drops? Are you always gong to be responsible for drops in demand? Austerity has killed a lot demand recently – is that your fault? Are you being treated fairly Malcolm?
Workers getting around a table with their employers is a good way to run a company. It’s when you add external, remote and over-powerful shareholders when things start to unwind. And when the general managers align themselves with shareholders then that is when things typically get worse for everyone else. That is why Labour’s proposal is a step in the right direction.
Your last para is very true
Pilgrim,
Having lived and worked in Germany, I agree about the benefit of worker participation in company management (at all levels, not just at Board level), which has generally improved financial performance at company, local, regional and national levels.
However, I think the performance of their national economy probably owes more to the political structure of the country. PR voting makes political representation more representative at both national and Laender (no umlauts available) level, and tends to force the politics of concensus on them. We used to hear that FPTP gave UK the advantage of strong government with clear policies, but on recent evidence that simply doesn’t apply. It also meant that significant proportions of the UK public have little or no effective voice in parliament, so hardly a representative democracy. The existence of government at Laender level also reinforces local regional identity, which is completely the opposite direction of travel from recent UK Tory policy of pretending such healthy distinctions must be stamped out.
The devolved political engines of the Laender in turn developed separate economic engines, so that, if one region’s economy caught a cold, the rest of the nation didn’t necessarily develop pneumonia. Compare that with the UK, where London’s economic sniffles can cause existential threats across large swathes of the UK. I realise this makes me sound like I favour a federal UK solution and I did up till about 30 years ago, but I fear it’s now too late for that. The English regions have shown little interest in a federal approach, while Scotland has wakened up to the fact that it’s highly improbable that it could make a bigger mess of running its own affairs and seems set on a process of disengagement. Wales is taking tentative steps towards greater devolution, but I think it’s too early to call the outcome. Meanwhile the wild card of NI has the capacity to bring down the UK government across a range of issues, so my view is that federalism is now a dead duck in the UK and the chance is gone.
Labour’s proposals for worker participation are long overdue, but the chances are the UK will split up before their benefits become apparent.
Ken
You are right to mention the Laender/federal set up in Germany which has very often acted as a bulwark against the more destructive and neo-liberal political and economic aspirations of whatever party is at the centre.
I might add that the Laender nor the Federal system stopped Schroeder’s efforts to get the German worker to accept pay cuts during his time in office – in fact you could see that as a perverse triumph of how workers and industry work together in Germany. I’m made aware of this because that drop in wages also meant a drop in savings in German society at the same time which came to light during the 2008 crash – something Tory and New Labour austerity addicts and neo-lib economists need to think about.
I would also ask you not to underestimate the existence in German industry of the ‘Mittelstand’ the middle sized German firms – many family owned (and not owned shall we say by fly by night share holders extracting money all of the time) that also bring in stability to that stability so to speak (although according to Tom Brown – who worked in the UK and Germany – this set up is also under pressure in Germany).
So with those mild caveats, I totally agree with what you have said Ken.
Tom Brown’s book ‘Tragedy and Challenge’ is to me the only recent writing of any calibre that any decent politician should use as the basis for a renaissance in manufacturing in this country – I’d recommend it to every one – including Jeremy Corbyn and John McD – as a basis for sound industrial policy. That book should also by required reading at what ever the DTI is these days too.
Things are getting quite tense on this thread aren’t they.
A sign of things to come if Labour win next GE on their present programme?
Capitalism has been our staple diet for so long, people’s attitudes will need changing drastically if we want a less selfish and violent form to become normalised and acceptable to the majority of bosses and shareholders.
The present Labour leadership, in my opinion, will find this hard to do.
Their own abrasive and populist attitudes need to be overcome before they should tackle others’ attitudes. If they want to lead, they must start at the top.
Forms of Social capitalism have been tried fairly successfully elsewhere, but took decades to be widely accepted as the norm.
The UK has an extreme form of capitalism, though not as extreme as in the U.S.
It will take a long time and a lot of educating if we ever want to change things and get them accepted, a lot of patient compromising to begin, a lot of educating.
Somehow I doubt the present Leadership has the skills or the will to do that.
They need to get as many as possible on board if they are to do that
They are trying
There is some way to go
I hope you’re right. They have to try. They have to get the majority on board. The country is extremely divided for all sorts of reasons.
Generations are divided, social groups are divided, Leavers and Brexiters, townies and rurals, North and South…so many divisions.
Uniting the majority across these lines is the only way forward, but it’s a mammoth task.
Policies are only a start. I used to call mine only ‘guidelines to be put into the bullring of realities’.
Violent as that may sound, if they keep trying to listen, and react fast but decisively and fairly, it may end up helping a majority of people.
Listening to people’s needs is so hard to do when your agenda is stubbornly ingrained.
Dogma has not place on this journey. We need adapted and adaptable ideas, and new momentum.
Pilgrim Slight Return says:
“You doth protest too much..”
Aye, and I too perhaps, in pedantic manner, do protest that should read “thou dost…” (methinks) 🙂
As a Quaker I would agree
Bout let me also add ‘I don’t give a damn’
Alas-tair (sorry for the pun)
Fear not!
I have been studying Petersen for one reason and one reason only: to try to understand why some people find his writing attractive. What has Petersen tapped into? Because there is definitely something there. And its a problem. And we have to acknowledge it.
I have also been looking at millennial websites which have an anti-Left angle as there are similar feelings and views expressed on these to Petersen.
I first saw anti-Left sentiment in millennials whilst attending seminars about poverty during my work on welfare reform for my social landlord employer. It took me totally by surprise. It was if these people were rejecting help and support from the Left who for so long had been there champion. It was pure rejection.
My copy of Petersen’s ’12 Rules’ is covered in my writing and I was going to do a review on a well known website (may have even shoved it under the nose of Progressive Pulse) but work and family commitments put paid to that (alas I do not have our Richard’s drive, and I am more likely to play my guitar when in a tight spot than write) . But I am still mulling this issue over and it is not off my radar.
In short Alastair, I’m studying Petersen as one would study a dangerous toxin – i.e. carefully and with full protection. Having said that though, you have to read him in order to understand where he and is hinterland are coming from. You have to step into his/their world a little.
That sounds worth doing