Are we living through a new Gilded Age, where a small number of enormous corporations have accumulated too much economic and political power? In this video, I argue that monopoly and oligopoly are becoming serious threats not only to competitive markets, but also to democracy.
Monopoly power is about much more than prices. Dominant corporations can control market access, acquire potential competitors, exploit intellectual property rights, and use financial resources to protect their position. The result can be fewer choices for consumers and greater barriers for smaller businesses.
Economic power can also become political power. Large corporations have extensive lobbying operations and access to politicians and officials that ordinary citizens and smaller businesses cannot match. I examine examples ranging from technology and AI to pharmaceuticals and companies involved in Britain's public infrastructure.
We have faced this problem before. At the beginning of the 20th century, President Teddy Roosevelt of the USA challenged the power of America's so-called robber barons. His argument was straightforward: corporations exist because governments provide the laws and institutions that make them possible, and democratic governments therefore have both the right and responsibility to regulate them.
I consider what Britain can learn from Roosevelt today. Decades of mergers, acquisitions, privatisation, and shifting attitudes towards competition have increased corporate concentration, while natural monopolies such as water and energy raise fundamental questions about whether essential services should be run primarily for private profit.
I argue that we need stronger merger scrutiny, a willingness to break up excessively dominant corporations, greater transparency around lobbying, and public control of natural monopolies where regulation cannot protect the public interest.
Economic power should not override democratic authority. Markets should serve society, and government must have the courage to ensure that they do.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
Are we living in a new age of monopoly power, and do we have a need to tackle it?
That is the topic which I'm tackling in this video because a handful of enormous corporations are increasingly dominating our economy and that of the world. They control markets, influence governments, and extract excessive profits. Their power extends far beyond the price consumers pay. They are increasingly challenging the authority of our democratic governments. So have we entered a new Gilded Age equivalent to that which we had at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and what should we be doing about it?
Monopoly is about much more than the absence of competition. That will be a recurring theme of this video.
A monopoly exists when one business controls a market.
An oligopoly exists when a small number of businesses dominate a market. They effectively, by cooperation, create a monopoly even though there is more than one company involved.
Both of these structures can restrict competition and extract excessive profits from customers. Economists call those excessive returns economic rents, and these matter. You pay for those rents, so of course they matter.
But there is a greater danger still from the exercise of the economic power that these companies have because it in turn creates political power. And oligopoly in particular is now commonplace in the British economy. A handful of major banks dominate personal and business banking. Large supermarket chains control much of our food retailing. Mobile phone networks and a few internet service providers are similarly concentrated, and major technology companies dominate software and digital services. We are now seeing the same trend developing in AI.
The choices available to consumers and smaller businesses are becoming increasingly restricted, and this corporate concentration creates economic power that can be abused.
Dominant businesses can influence prices, contracts, and market access. They can use intellectual property rights to protect their market positions, and they do, as a matter of fact, do that. And their financial resources allow them to challenge potential competitors, often buying them, so that they are eliminated. Smaller businesses then face barriers that established corporations can avoid. Genuine enterprise suffers when markets are controlled by powerful incumbents.
And corporate economic power is increasingly translating into political power. This is what I worry about. Large corporations maintain very significant lobbying operations with substantial resources. They employ lobbyists, lawyers, consultants, and, of course, former political advisers and even cabinet ministers. They secure access to ministers and officials that ordinary people rarely enjoy. Their influence can shape legislation, regulation and government contracts. The resulting political system is anything but the level playing field that the proponents of market economies suggest should exist if they are to operate efficiently.
The abuse of corporate power is then becoming increasingly obvious. Elon Musk demonstrates how concentrated wealth can create political influence, and very few think that his influence is benign.
At the same time, major AI companies are accumulating extraordinary technological and economic power whilst Palantir, another company based in Silicon Valley, raises questions about corporate influence over public information systems, not least in the UK, as its tentacles are now spreading far and wide into the NHS, our defence systems and even our police.
What is more, pharmaceutical companies are now regularly using supply threats to press our government over prices. Our health is their plaything when it comes to the exercise of corporate power. The question is whether elected governments or corporations are really in control of our economy as a result.
We have seen this concentration of power before. The late 19th century became known as America's Gilded Age. Industrialists accumulated enormous wealth through increasingly concentrated markets. John D. Rockefeller dominated oil through Standard Oil, which, of course, is ESSO today. JP Morgan, whose bank still exists, exercised immense influence over banking and railroads, and Andrew Carnegie built a steel empire that became part of US Steel.
Those names are still known. These people shaped the world at that time. But there was somebody who took offence at this: Theodore Roosevelt, who became known as Teddy Roosevelt, and who became president of the USA in 1901, took on the robber barons, as he called them. He recognised that corporate concentration threatened the public interest. He rejected the idea that corporations should operate without effective oversight. He believed that government had a duty to supervise and regulate corporate power.
In his first annual message to Congress on 3 December 1901, he made this clear. Roosevelt understood that corporations owed their existence to government. He made a fundamental point about the legal foundations of corporate power. He said, “Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions.”
Corporations depend upon laws, courts, and government institutions for their existence. Their power is therefore not independent of the democratic state. Roosevelt believed that this gave government both authority and responsibility to act to constrain their powers. He insisted that government had a duty to regulate corporations, and as a result, he rejected the idea that corporate power should operate without democratic supervision.
He said, and I've edited this very lightly, “It is therefore our right and our duty to see that these corporations work in harmony with the institutions of democracy.” Government, he said, was entitled to demand that corporations serve the public interest. The protection of private property did not, he said, justify unlimited corporate power. Democratic government had to remain more powerful than the corporations it created. That was his argument.
And in all of this, Roosevelt believed that corporate transparency was essential. He understood that governments could not regulate business without information. “The first requisite”, he said in that speech in 1901, “is knowledge, full and complete.” Corporations had to disclose enough information, in his opinion, for their activities to be scrutinised, and that's a principle that still applies today.
Government needed to understand their ownership, operation and market power. Without transparency, corporate accountability would be impossible. And those principles that were set out in Roosevelt's message to Congress in December 1901 are just as relevant 125 years later. Teddy Roosevelt knew what we need to know now.
Roosevelt then demonstrated that governments could challenge corporate power. His administration successfully challenged JP Morgan's Northern Securities Railroad Combination. The Supreme Court of the USA ordered that combination to be dissolved in 1904, and his administration also pursued Standard Oil under antitrust legislation, and Standard Oil was eventually broken up in 1911, admittedly, after he left office. His challenge to corporate power established that the state could act against monopolies.
We should be taking note of that now because right at this moment in the UK, the threat from monopolies should be taken more seriously. Government departments and competition authorities used to scrutinise corporate concentration. Mergers and acquisitions were frequently challenged when they threatened competition. But the arrival of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 changed the political direction.
Privatisation and neoliberal thinking increasingly favoured private corporate ownership. The belief that markets knew best weakened the political commitment to restraining corporate power.
The decline in the number of listed British companies exposes by how much power is being concentrated within our economy. In the 1960s, when I was young, approximately 4,600 companies were listed on the London Stock Exchange. Today, with slightly different definitions of what a listed company might be, I admit, there are fewer than 2000 companies on that exchange, and the number leaving is a steady flow. There is a decline of more than half over approximately 60 years.
Takeovers, mergers, delistings, and changes in corporate financing have contributed to this decline, and there are current examples to show what is happening. BT's acquisition of, first EE and now TalkTalk, is an example of substantial market consolidation, and if Sky takes over ITV, which is currently a listed company, it too will result in increased UK market concentration. Fewer listed companies do not automatically prove the existence of monopoly, but the trend demands investigation.
And privatisation has created a particularly damaging form of monopoly. Some industries are natural monopolies because competing networks are inefficient. Water supply is the obvious example of such an industry, but it's not alone. Electricity and gas can never be truly competitive. There is only one gas pipe into your house. There is only one set of electricity cables into your house. They cannot therefore give rise to competition.
Thatcher's privatisation programme transferred important public assets into private ownership, and private owners have ever since extracted profits from services that customers cannot avoid buying. Essential monopolies like these should serve the public rather than maximise private financial returns.
A courageous state would challenge this concentration of corporate power. At the same time, it would understand that fair markets are essential if genuine enterprise is to flourish. Effective competition requires much stronger scrutiny of mergers and acquisitions. Existing corporations should also face breakup when their dominance threatens public well-being. And natural monopolies should be brought under public control when regulation cannot prevent abuse, whilst corporate lobbying must also be made transparent and subject to democratic accountability in ways that have failed to deliver so far, but which must be enforced in the future.
The message then is clear. It is time to rediscover Roosevelt's political courage. Corporations exist because governments provide the legal framework that creates them. They have no inherent right to exercise power against the public interest as a consequence. Economic power must never be allowed to override democratic authority. And markets should serve society, and governments must ensure that they do. We need a courageous state willing to redraw the boundaries of corporate power. We have not got it, and we need politicians of courage to recreate it.
That's what I think. I believe we need to transform the way in which the corporation works inside the modern world. But what do you think? There is a poll down below. Let us have your comments.
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Obviously there are merits in keeping your polls to a simple pattern.
That said, in this case, I advocate: (1) Bring essential monopolies into public ownership. (2) Break up corporations that dominate markets. (3) Regulate them much more strictly. (4) Governments should then maintain constant vigilance of how businesses compete in the market.
Noted.
And thank you.
Some are easy. Others, not so much.
This reminds me of the Off-Shore Trust Tax China introduced.
I don’t see it as a tool to earn money but as a tool to exert power, as not paying the tax results in, surely amongst other things, not being able to do business in China anymore or getting state contracts.
And I’ve heard that a lot of companies did pay already instead of juggling their finances as the Chinese government knew to a surprising extent about their doings.
Is this possible because China’s so large or could another, smaller country like the UK do that as well with the same success?
And could companies exert a bit of power themselves by forcing their contractors not to do business there or would they just shoot themselves in the foot that way as well?
We still have the power to stop abuse.
But it would mean we would have to give up abusing.
That’s the trade-off.
I wanted to vote for the first three options.
I also wonder who will own the AI technical capability used throughout the UK? I see a possible ever-developing threat here.
A great review and analysis.
My understanding is that the first corporations were public ones charged with great improvements works such as drainage/sewage etc., on behalf of all the people. I know of a town whose council headquarters is on ‘Corporation Street’. Our streets and towns up and down the country have commemorative stones in many buildings quietly celebrating their achievements (I bet quite a few are privately owned now).
Crafty and dishonest Neo-liberalism made out that public institutions and even governments were monopolies – and what sort of ideology does that – accuses others of what it actually believes in – well Fascist of course! We’ve seen the rise of private corporations – that now have the legal status of a person – and the corresponding debasement of public versions – city and county councils whose remits have been stripped out and given to the market leaving them with the most costly things to do and shrinking budgets to cope.
What is galling but also revealing about the Neo-liberal take on public provision is that they completed ignored the democratic connection – that these so-called (public) monopolies were politically accountable all of the time to voters. Thence, their accuser’s really had no case at all. But they still got away with it.
Who really runs Britain? A bunch of thieves who once having had their robber empires taken away from them, decided to rob their own country blind. That was Thatcher’s answer to our ‘decline’ and also the other Neo-lib blind spot – as Steve Keen points out, they never think about where the money they are churning comes from (usually other people’s wealth) as long as it goes into their pockets of course. ‘Accounting’? My arse!
Thank you
Every one should be asking this. The unspoken assumption that we are a democracy promulgated by BBC should by now be thoroughly discredited<p>
Monopoly money floods political parties and special interest lobby money funds individual politicians.<p>
It could be argued that many politicians (‘they are in it for themselves’) now see politics as a road to riches (Blair, Kinnock, Hodge , Clegg, Watson etc) – with all the lobbying, access, freebies visits to Israel, New York etc. and a great future employed by businesses they were previously ‘regulating'<p>
Labour Together who organised the coup against Corbyn and tried to get journalists arrested for doing their job – had plenty of monopoly money.<p>
Even after the reformUK scandal of £72m from a billionaire – there is no campaigning to get money out of politics.
Yes Richard – ‘ we need politicians of courage’ but the money is making sure they are not selected as MP candidates.
What happens when the money runs out?
These people always have one eye on the next grift, which is how they ensure that the money never runs out and the risks are dealt with from the public purse.
Who runs (owns!) Britain?
I thoroughly recommend James Meek’s Private Island; why Britain now belongs to someone else.
Also ex colleague Stewart Lansley The richer the Poorer – which I haven’t yet read <p>
Covers 200 years to 2020<p>
https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-richer-the-poorer
As a nation, we are threadbare. Most of our infrastructure is owned by foreign interests, almost all of our polity is. I have never known the country this low, and so polluted with malign actors like Farage.
Looking at the history of this country without the propaganda we have always been a nation extracting resources from other nations in part through local lack. Today we are effectively run by a rich clique which we should call robber barons, calling a spade by its correct name.
Agreed
Might the main stream media, including the B. B. C., and big political donors be part of the cabal who effectively run Britain?
I think you know the answer to that.
Steve, I watched Kuenssberg interview Polanski today. The ethnic cleansing in the West Bank has, in the last few days, seem violence against an American reporter who was hospitalised. Also against a French Bishop and French politician. The daily killing on Gaza continues. But the questioning was about the Green Party resolution rather than the war crimes.
The panel consisted of a Labour supporter who was pro-Palestinian , a broadcaster who was ‘appalled’ at Polnski and Nadine Dorres of Reform (who was not asked if deportation threats might upset some people. )
IMHO Polanski gave measured and sensible replies. The constant question was ‘does he support the right of Israel to exist?’ ( Never the right of Palestine to exist it seems )
I have seen the interview on youtube with several comments it is not available on iplayer.
It is now almost two years since 230 (including 100 BBC journalists) media professionals signed a letter to theBBC saying its coverage was biased.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bbc-israel-gaza-letter-tim-davie-bias-palestine-b2636737.html?reloaded=1
The sixty former British Ambassadors and High Commissioners (ambassadors to Commonwealth countries) wrote to the Financial Times in April saying Israel was accelerating the annexation of the West Bank, thus making a two state solution more difficult, and calling for action. I can find no BBC report on this.
Much to my regret, I have to say it looks like news manipulation by omission.
Thank you.
@ Ian Stevenson
The question being put to Polanski is meaningless. How can he answer?
Whence Czechoslovakia? Yugoslavia? Where is the United Kingdom going if Scotland is to gain independence? Could California secede from the USA?
Israel does not have the “right to exist”. Rights belong to people, not artificial man-made lines on a map.
Israelis as people have the right to exist. Israel does not.
I am musing about doing a video on this.
Political economy and international relations clearly support Polanski’s view.
“We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for consumers.” (Theodore Rooseveldt)
The ex-neoliberal economist Jeffrey Sachs suggests that Europe has been occupied since 1945, by the USA, and now 80+ years after the end of WW2, you can not be a significant politician and anti-American.
Source: ‘Eight Countries Kept Silent…’: Jeffrey Sachs Reveals How US Banned His Speech at UN! (14 Oct 2026)
See also Operation Gladio in BBC Timewatch | Gladio | Pt. 1 – The Ringmasters (from a time when the BBC was more impartial)
Recently published research by a team at University College London led by Mariana Mazzucato shows that since the turn of the century actual investment in producing goods and services by major corporations has stalled and even declined slightly in the UK and other European countries, while overall corporate balance sheets including profits and dividends paid have continued to grow. Loans and asset purchases have made up the gap.
Thus tangible growth in available goods and services lags behind reported GDP growth figures, with deleterious effects on employment, wages and living standards. Tax structures have not focused sufficiently on tangible investment and instead fed concentration of wealth.
If major corporations are not mobilising resources to increase productive capacity, public programmes and institutions must ensure this can be done without being undermined by bond market volatility. ISA savings may be progressively re-directed to the National Wealth Fund. Tangible UK investment bonds bonds, redeemable before maturity but not made available for sale to third parties would reduce bond market vulnerability. Although conventional Treasury bonds will continue to be issued to fund public expenditure, only tangible UK investment instruments should enjoy the tax breaks previously accorded savings and bonds more generally, for example in relation to retirement savings.
To embed devolved investment initiatives across the country, Government should create more public investment trusts outside its Budget which can issue the bonds described above to initiate tangible local investment in several sectors including energy, water, transport, health and education. There are ample personal and corporate savings to purchase such tangible investment-dedicated financial instruments to enable many local initiatives to be so launched, and returns on such investments are guaranteed by the assets and revenue streams generated as with the New Town Corporations
There will be two videos on these themes this week
Two! Only two!
What did I tell you about not being able to keep up in Ely?
Time waiteth for not part-timer like me……………..
I haven’t decided on those for the rest of the week as yet….
Global neoliberal economics benefits a small number of people, but at the moment, I see Trump working to impose fossil fuels as the global energy hegemon, destroying the economics of any other energy forms. Retired U.S. Navy intelligence officer and author Malcolm Nance calls the fossil fuel industry leaders the oiligopoly. Thus the takeover of Venezuela’s oil, the attempts on Greenland and Alberta, Canada, the pausing of sanctions on Russia 2 days before they are to go into effect and the diesel deal with Putin, clearly illegal under existing federal law.
I also see that Trump, Putin, and Musk have engineered a coup. We don’t know who caused Ukraine’s Starshield to slow down but those are the 3 conspirators. We know that by betraying the U.S. Senate over the pausing of the Lindsay Graham Sanctions law, the Republican Senate leaders have said that Trump’s legislative agenda is dead on arrival in the Senate. As Trump’s advisors probably know that quite well, this tells us that Trump believes he no longer needs the Senate, or Congress.
This means that Trump and Putin do not care how people vote, as they believe that US democracy is over and done with. Probably you don’t need an elaboration on that.
For you in the UK and in Europe, if the UK and France and Germany can not create strong coalitions of the center and the left who can agree on implementing MMT, the Front National and Germany’s AfD and whatever thugs you all have seem likely to prevail.
Much to agree with
The idea of combining Lindsay Graham and MMT is a bit weird. Graham is surely one of the worst far right warmongering thugs ever. Much better to look over to the head of the Russian central bank who’s been able to selectively introduce MMT.
Every bank does MMT
Tim Putnam, Lindsey Graham is dead, but the legislation he authored, the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, was passed and signed by the president. It was co-authored by Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat. Senator Graham died in July; a renewed push to pass the bill and name it for him passed in September. In June 2025, Graham said in a television interview: “I’ve got 84 co-sponsors for a Russian sanctions bill that is an economic bunker buster against China, India, and Russia for Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.”
Graham was a war hawk. He pushed for and supported NATO, Israel, and Ukraine. He was also a brilliant political operator. During his 2014 re-election campaign, he befriended potential opponents from his state’s congressional delegation and helped them with fundraising and securing their preferred committee assignments. At the time of his death he was a member of the U.S. Congressional International Conservation Caucus, a bipartisan congressional organization with the conviction that “the United States of America has the opportunity, the obligation and the interests to advance the conservation of natural resources for this and future generations and a commitment to promote U.S. leadership in public/private conservation partnerships worldwide.
You just never can tell, eh?
Graham’s reputation as a despicable US imperialist is not improved a joy by associating any Dems with it, just remember the abuses Obama and Biden showered on the world pretending to serve a self serving universal order. They even went beyond what Brzezinsky advised following Mackinder, that one must at all costs keep Russia and Europe apart or they’d become bigger than the US in too many ways.
One of the first monopolies that needs breaking up is the vertical monopoly (or is it oligopoly?) of house building companies. In particular building land ownership and the building of houses should be separated. To prevent long term land banking a progressively increasing tax should be raised on land consented for building.
I have for quite some time held the opinion that the Western world is living through a corporate coup d’etat, this for me was painfully obvious when observing DT’s inaugureation and the billionaires standing like some dystopian backing band.
This month is the 60th anniversary of the activation of the ISDS department within the world bank, allowing corporations to sue entire nations, noted in Matt Kennard and Claire Provosts book “Silent Coup”, “how corporations overthrough democracy”
The monoplolies and mergers commission was disbanded in 1999 and replaced with the competitions commission, also replaced in 2014 with the copetitions and market authority. Each time weakening the regulators power and disolving it in to self governamce.
There are many other legislative changes and policy choices made in the last 60 years that have effectively given power away from governemnt to corporations, this has been going on for quite some time, from as early as 1933 and Hayeks reactionary book “Road to Serfdom” as reaction to the economic collapse and the New deal.
There have been many demonstrations across Europe recently, notably France, Spain, Italy, Albania and Greece, from a host of different grievances, students to pensioners etc. They all have the same root cause analysis fed from Hayeks narrative and the application of Neo-liberalism as the driver of capitalism, creating the ground for the corporate coup d’etat we see today.
I believe the needed revolution against Neo-Liberalism will start in Europe probably France or Italy but any new direction needs to focus on the increasing corporate control of governments and the disbanding of multi-nationals or at least severe controls on their reach.
Oh and one last last thing, wipe Private Equity from the face of the earth.
This is all part of the neoliberal thinking that has dominated since the 1980s. The Chicago School led by Milton Friedman said that the main objective of corporations is to maximize shareholder value and everything else is irrelevant. This is still the prevailing doctrine taught in business schools today.