Can Capitalism be redeemed?
On Saturday 8 September I was lucky enough to be asked to be the Tory Workers voice in a debate about the future of Capitalism. Thank you to the Big Tent Ideas Festival for hosting the debate. Here are my opening remarks.
I’d like to start with a quote from James Joyce’s Dubliners.
“He told her that for some time he had assisted at meetings of an Irish Socialist Party where he had felt himself a unique figure amidst a score of sober workmen in a garret lit by an inefficient oil-lamp. When the party had divided into three sections, each under its own leader and in its own garret, he had discontinued his attendances. The workmen’s discussions, he said, were too timorous; the interest they took in the question of wages was inordinate. He felt that they were hard-featured realists and that they resented an exactitude which was the produce of a leisure not within their reach. No social revolution, he told her, would be likely to strike Dublin for some centuries.”
I think this is a great quote for two reasons. The first is that it tells you what really mattes to working people. Forget the talk of ideology and systems, what matters is how they and their family can live their lives. A few years ago a YouGov survey found that the four things workers value the most are family, fairness, hard work, and decency. Is today’s capitalism fair? Does it reward those who work hard over the well-connected? Are working people treated decently? Can you give your family a good life? People don’t care about the -ism or the -dom, they want positive answers to these questions.
The second is that joke at the end of the quote has been turned on its head — we may face a social revolution soon. 68% of working class people say that Britain has changed for the worse over the past 20–30 years. Wage growth is stagnant — the slowest it has been since we sent children up chimneys. From a day-to-day perspective, the wage ice-age can seem inconsequential. The cost of clothes, electronics, entertainment and food has stayed static or fallen. I can get a pizza delivered to my kitchen table while I watch the first 10 minutes of 20 programmes on Netflix. It is the cost of housing, health care and education — the things that give you stability and opportunity — that has sprinted ahead of most people’s ability to keep up. If you can’t give good shelter and opportunities to your family then deep down you feel pretty shitty.
And finally we need to talk about Austerity. Why, a decade on from the Crash, is Austerity still happening? Working people are more likely to rely on public services such as the NHS, schools, libraries, the police and the safety-net of benefits. If you take away the spaces where people can mix together, if you take away the services that provide piece-of-mind that no matter what folk will be healthy and have a roof over their head — people will feel more and more trapped. When Austerity was introduced the deal was, yes it’s going to be tough for five-years, but if we all tighten our belts then we can get back to normal. Today Austerity continues for most people while the Masters of the Universe continue to get richer. Is this Capitalism?
Capitalism does need to be redeemed otherwise this country will take a punt on Socialism, and as history shows us, when the socialists start failing they sacrifice the lives of ordinary working folk — sometimes millions of us — to try and make their ideology work. Please tell me how Capitalism can be made to work for workers? Give me hope.
