I’m not sure I’d accept that New Labour was a social democratic force, or even acted with social democratic motives; its policies on civil liberties, foreign affairs and a whole range of social issues give the lie to any such label, however much some of its acolytes might want to wrap themselves in the robes of social democracy now.

Moore’s 2 examples referred to above are a timely wake up call to those who talk the talk about being radical and progressive, but are not yet prepared to walk the walk (yes, Ed Miliband we DO mean you).

A fairer more equal society presupposes re-distributive measures; New Labour and now the Coalition are happy to see the redistribution flow from the poor to the rich. They have to be disabused that their failed policies are acceptable. If “Newer” Labour aren’t going to take up Mr Moore’s challenge, it’s time we replaced them with people who will.

Of course the state has always acted for capitalists but not all of the left are statists, we who are socialists first and liberals second have been shouting this out for years.
We can only stop capitalists from capturing the state by eradicating the capitalist system, nothing less.

I just don’t see how this argument stacks up. Yes, the power of the state has in some cases been used to effect redistribution to the rich; but it has also been used to effect redistribution to the poor (and those in the middle, for that matter) – both direct (in the form of benefits, tax credits, pensions etc.) and indirect (in the form of tax-funded services). So I don’t see anything to justify the conclusion that the state needs to be ‘disempowered’; a more reasonable conclusion might be that its power needs to be exercised in the right way.

@3 GO

“I don’t see anything to justify the conclusion that the state needs to be ‘disempowered’; a more reasonable conclusion might be that its power needs to be exercised in the right way.”

Perhaps you are right it isn’t the state per se that needs to be ‘disempowered’.. I’m not sure that is exactly what people opposed to the current way of doing things are arguing though is it? …or if it is… may be that isn’t the important point.

As we found out with the whole nauseating New Labour project, sometimes the biggest lies come from between such nice teeth. If those exercising the power of the state have no principles, even the good things they do have to be measured against the damage they are doing at the same time.

So, yes… power has to be exercised in the right way; but there is still a role for the state. We can have a discussion about how big the role is, or how efficiently it is performed; but unless you’re a fully paid up anarchist, or a true believer in the Big Society +/or Tea Party aficionado, there aren’t many people who actually think it should be disempowered to the extent that many on the right would like to see.

Anyone who doesn’t believe you can successfully “sell” ordinary people a role for the state and a communitarian outlook wasn’t paying attention when the the SNP gave the New Labouristas in Scottish Labour a gubbing at the last Scottish election.

3,4,
We have had corporatism now for many years and it doesn’t work, if the system doesn’t work and all attempts to rectify the problems doesn’t work, it’s time for a new system.

@ 5

..and your suggested alternative is socialism? I think that might have been tried steve; and even if you argue it wasn’t “true” socialism, good luck getting people to vote it in!

I have been disappeared. The comment that I posted an hour ago is no longer present.

” The free market right and the statist left are, then, guilty of similar errors. Just as the right fails to see that “free markets” can be a means whereby capitalists exercise power over workers, so the statist left fails to see that the state can also be such a means. ”

Have been saying that for two years on here. The fundamentalists who say the market is always right and the statists who believe the shortcomings of statism can be sorted with more statism are two sides of the same coin. If lefties want to be relevant, they need to develop new ideas distinct from top-down statism. They could start by being less insular and UK-centric and look across the world at what works elsewhere.

Ask the average person who and what organisations piss them off and you will invariably find it is state agencies that they are complaining about and not capitalists. When people complain about schools, it is against the state that they have a grievance not capitalists. Ditto hospitals etc. It is not capitalists who are preventing smokers smoking in their local pub that is the state. Capitalists are not persecuting and imprisoning them for consuming drugs. The state and its agencies do those things. Ask them how many grievances they have against the local Chamber of Commerce compared to their grievances against the local council.

The state from absolute monarchy to municipal socialism has always been about exercising power. The reason exercising power through statism does not work is because the agencies of the state are more interested in serving their own interests rather than the interests of the people for whom they are supposed to be providing a service. Capitalists at least have an incentive to serve the interests of customers otherwise they will not come back and that reduces profits. The state incentives are towards developing a self-reinforcing attitude of what is good for that agency is the same thing as what is good for the public. The police just assume what is good for the police is good for the public. Health and education departments serve the interests of their employees. The local library do not give a shit whether one hundred people visit that day or four hundred. The local councillor might care what people think because they will be seeking reelection. However, the local council do not care because there is not another council across the road.

Finding creative ways to realign those incentives is what lefties should be trying to figure out, but statism will not do because statism is the problem.

Good post.
One thought: everyone is now supposed to be ‘against the statist left’. Even is we allow that the welfare-ism of the 60s isn’t quite fit for purpose in 2011, what is vision you have? Surely not the ‘big society’? ..assuming you support the NHS? At the moment we seem to be offered as alternatives (1) the shrunken state (courtesy:neoliberalism) or the Big Society (=the shrunken state, in practice -see (1)).

We need a radical rethink that isn’t just the other two above, which are in practice a return to the market.

Unsettling thought:

Or was Lenin right in State and Revolution?

“Edouard Balladur, the former French [Gaullist] prime minister, memorably once asked: ‘What is the market? It is the law of the jungle, the law of nature. And what is civilisation? It is the struggle against nature.’”
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.05/culture.html

There ain’t no such thing as free markets except perhaps in the middle of tropical rainforests where there is no rule of law. The governments of all so-called advanced economies intervene in markets to define and enforce property rights, to regulate to maintain technical standards and the systemic stability of financial systems, to tax activities deemed to inflict social harm and subsidise activities deemed to enhance social welfare, and to prevent abuses of market power. Central banks act to stabilise inflation rates. Some governments apply taxes and distribute benefits to maintain social safetynets amd reduce the inequality of incomes as generated by markets.

The sensible debate is about the mix of laws, regulations, central banking interventions, taxes and subsidies and competition policy most conducive to maintaining sustainable prosperity.

Those who go around chanting mantra about deregulation and “freer markets” are mostly ignorant fools.

The trouble with Lenin’s prescription is that it becomes necessary, as he soon came to appreciate, to create something like the Cheka – the ultimate ancestor of the KGB – to make it work and then the system becomes vulnerable to abuses by despots like Stalin. As Trotsky put it:

“If a universal mind existed, of the kind that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace—a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion, that could forecast the results of their inter-reactions—such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan, beginning with the number of acres of wheat down to the last button for a vest. The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal; that is why it so easily frees itself from the control of the market and of Soviet democracy.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1932/1932-sovecon.htm

@ Richard W

“Ask the average person who and what organisations piss them off and you will invariably find it is state agencies that they are complaining about and not capitalists.”

A hypothesis for you: the reason people are more likely to get very pissed off with hospitals, schools etc. than with ‘capitalist’ organisations is that the quality of service they’re getting from hospitals, schools etc. really, really matters to them. It’s no wonder people get a bit pissed off if their children end up dead because their leukemia didn’t get diagnosed in time, for instance.

Compare that with most of the ‘capitalist’ organisations people have dealings with: shops, restaurants etc. If people aren’t inclined to get similarly pissed off when Dixons don’t deliver their washing machine on the agreed date, or their pizza is a bit burned round the edges, does that really say anything profound about the relative merits of state agencies and capitalists?

I humbly submit that in cases where people are receiving from capitalists services that matter as much to them as the services they receive from hospitals and schools – e.g. nursing home care, investment advice, pension fund management – people are just as likely to get very pissed of with those capitalists as they are with state agencies.

Of course ‘the left’ – as in those who sought to moderate the worst excesses of capitalism, rather than try to replace it – were right. Every time ‘capitalism’ – i.e. in the sense of de-regulated markets – have been unleashed, the result has been the same. Late J.S. Mill saw it, Hobhouse explained it, Polanyi thought he’d buried it, but it keeps coming back in all its zombiefied rapacity. The question is: how could it take Charles Moore so long to see it. Perhaps the ‘middle-classes’ – i.e. the top 20%-30% – are happy to go along with it until the full implications hit them between the eyes, while those lower down the social scale feel its chill winds much earlier. Rising inequality has been leeching opportunity out of society for 20 years, but it’s now beginning to hit the relatively well-off – or more particularly their children, as they realise that all that hard work is about to evaporate in debt-servicing, care costs, keeping their kids at uni, trying to store enough away for a pension. Meanwhile, the top 1% – whose earnings are accelerating as fast as the economy motors downhill – have never had it so good, hoovering up the debt guarantees, and siphoning off rents from a captive housing market – funneling it into ‘offshore’ funds as tax rises for the rest.

Perhaps some of the right have finally woken up to the precarious nature of neo-feudalism.

You can be a supporter of capitalism AND recognise that this is the economics of the madhouse.

But, of course, the right have the money to capture government and the media (have a look at what the Koch brothers spend on ‘think-tanks’.

12
Bob B is right, we have never experienced a ‘free-market’, the problem is not the unleashing of free-markets, it’s the state intervention in markets which, not only leads to massive inequality, it serves to hide the real problems with capitalism.
You’ll find that many on the left would welcome a real free-market.

@8: “Ask the average person who and what organisations piss them off and you will invariably find it is state agencies that they are complaining about and not capitalists.”

That is complete and mendacious nonsense.

What has all the recent public debate over the extent of the control that News International exercises over UK media been about?

And this about our retail banks?

“Last year [2008], figures published by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) showed that almost a million people complained to their bank. The figures also revealed that six out of 10 of these complaints were rejected. By contrast, the Ombudsman Service rules in favour of the consumer in almost six out of 10 cases, although for certain types of complaints the ‘uphold’ rate is far higher.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/banking/6206351/Bank-complaints-dont-get-mad-get-even.html

Why have the retail banks recently set aside £5 billions to compensate victims of mis-selling PPI?

And this relating to Tesco, which has a 30% share of the retail grocery market?

“This article concerns criticism of Tesco, a supermarket chain in the United Kingdom. Criticism has been directed at Tesco from various groups, both national organisations and individuals. One of the biggest criticisms it faces is the perceived threat it poses to small businesses due to the monopoly it imposes over products. There is also a belief that they use aggressive tactics to gain land and/or planning permission for building new stores. Other controversial areas concern the treatment of staff and customers, as well as their approach to foreign businesses.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Tesco

@13: “You’ll find that many on the left would welcome a real free-market.”

No enforceable property rights and no competition policy to prevent abuses of market power?

14
Yep

Not much of a challenge to the left: virtually all of us are well aware that state power can be misused. Apart from the fact that many left activists have suffered from abuses of police power, it is no secret that we on the left condemn the Tory-led government for the social and economic damage that its spending cuts are causing. So to think that people on the left automatically support the state – well, that is just nonsense, even without mentioning the obvious (that anarchists are part of the left too).

Charles Moore defines the failure of the Euro zone as right wing failure referring to the Free market principles that were its supposed objective when the Labour Part opposed it. Dated I think …..The Conservative Partydefend the country against the consequences of a Euro Zone and the democratic deficit required to order it
There has always been an ambivalent attitude to ‘international’ trade. The conservative conception of a free market is based in small and local business the bed-rock of its support. In this local climate the market is a garden not a wilderness .In fact a well ordered garden is about as good an image of Conservatism as I can imagine ,here the market grows out of civil society. When money itself acts like a Combine harvester destroying the accumulated social and institutional capital Conservatives will often oppose it

The remarks about America are interesting . In this country the Conservative Party opposed the “enthusiasm” of the non conformists .In America Christianity is generally non conformist and enthusiastic for obvious reasons . They are Conservative because America is a historically religious country attacked by secularism.
The temperaments are directly opposed and when that side of the Republicans is dominant British Conservatives are bound to feel uncomfortable

What you see as a critique of the right Chris is that but only from a Conservative view point. Charles Moore does not really advocate socialism, of course not, he is expressing the disappointment of a sort of conservative , one \ am much in sympathy with actually.

Charles Wheeler

“Perhaps the ‘middle-classes’ – i.e. the top 20%-30% – are happy to go along with it until the full implications hit them between the eyes, while those lower down the social scale feel its chill winds much earlier. Rising inequality has been leeching opportunity out of society for 20 years, but it’s now beginning to hit the relatively well-off – or more particularly their children, as they realise that all that hard work is about to evaporate in debt-servicing, care costs, keeping their kids at uni, trying to store enough away for a pension. Meanwhile, the top 1% – whose earnings are accelerating as fast as the economy motors downhill – have never had it so good, hoovering up the debt guarantees, and siphoning off rents from a captive housing market – funneling it into ‘offshore’ funds as tax rises for the rest.”

You are certainly on to something here. The Tories have long relied on drawing a line between ‘us’ – hardworking, middle-class, responsible, tax-paying, aspirational types – and ‘them’ – lazy, lower-class, irresponsible, benefit-claiming, dead-end types. The narrative has been: ‘we’ are being bled dry to pay for ‘their’ services and benefits, and would be better off if ‘our’ taxes and ‘their’ services and benefits were cut. Now, finally, it is becoming clear to some of ‘us’ that ‘we’ are just as reliant on public spending as ‘they’ are – it’s ‘our’ schools, hospitals, social care services, pensions, tax credits, child benefit, higher education etc. that suffer when public spending is cut. Meanwhile, as you say, the rich (who never had to rely on state-funded schools etc. in the first place) do very nicely for themselves.

Case in point: many middle-class, middle-income families like mine will have recently opened a letter like the one I opened yesterday, informing me that my family’s tax credits are being cut by £2,800 a year. (For us that’s the equivalent of a 10% hike in basic rate tax.) Next year many similar families will lose a further £2,000 or more in Child Benefit. Surely it has got to start sinking in that the dividing line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ isn’t between the working classes and the middle classes, or between basic rate taxpayers and higher rate taxpayers, or between benefit recipients and taxpayers, or anything like that: it’s between people who rely on a high level of public spending for their quality of life (at least the bottom 95% of the income distribution) and people who don’t.

18
It’s the label really, ‘working-class’, I mean how can we on £50k or so a year, a house and a car and children in private education be working-class? I suspect there are thousands of people who are waking-up to the fact that maybe the guy who empties their bin isn’t so different to them.

I have considerable sympathy for what you have to say there GO we are also getting royally stuffed by Cameron cutting the “middle -class welfare state ” which after all includes student fees …but retaining the £40 billion of taxes required to pay for it.

It is a measure of quite how out of the game New Labour are in the South especially that Cameron can treat his own that way without fear

14. Bob B

@8: “Ask the average person who and what organisations piss them off and you will invariably find it is state agencies that they are complaining about and not capitalists.”

” That is complete and mendacious nonsense. ”

Let me guess Bob, you are a retired public servant?

Your usual word salad of irrelevant points do not disprove the general point. People also complain about the private sector is a revelation to no one. The difference is the public can do something about lame service. No amount of complaining about a bad education service will turn it into a good education service. No amount of complaining about a bad teacher will turn them into a good teacher. You need to change the system and its incentives. However, the various systems do not want to change because their incentives are to maintain the status quo, because they are only interested in serving their own interests.

The British Empire required less administration than the contemporary UK state. Why is that? Could it be because they are self-replicating bodies serving themselves not the public.

Your point about News International and News Corp. proves my point. The public can affect change even in those organisations when they they have a mind to do it. As soon as campaigns were affecting profits and had the potential to do even more damage action is taken and people are sacked. Some kids spend eleven years in the education system and learn virtually nothing and no one will ever be sacked for failure. Teachers will strike and march to protect their own wages and pensions. Hell will freeze over before they march on behalf of kids they send out into the labour force ill-equipped to cope. So whose interests are they really serving?

This is not about private good and public bad. My point is that our public statism has no incentives to be better.

@21: Richard W

As usual, more bombastic nonsense from you.

What matters is not my previous employment but the argument put @14 as supported there by press quotes with links relating to a million complaints about the banks from their customers, how the banks dismissed those complaints and the extent of criminal mis-selling of financial products by the retail banks.

I added reference to familiar collection of public complaints about Tesco to show this isn’t just about banks. It would be easy to add more examples.

The fact is that successive polls over decades have shown extensive public support for public institutions like the NHS despite criticisms about its performance.

The extent of the public debate over self-regulation by the press, whether News International should be permitted to own BSkyB outsight and over the extent of its ownership of media in Britain are hardly any indication that the public feels content about the status quo.

Aide memoire about banks and bankers:

- More mis-selling: “The Financial Services Authority has hit Barclays with a record 7.7 million pound fine for mis-selling two income investment products to more than 12,000 clients who lost money during the financial crisis.” [January 2011]
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKLNE70H03B20110118

- Insider dealing: “A City banker who amassed almost £600,000 through insider trading with his wife and a friend has been jailed for three years and four months.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12345373

- Undisclosed conflicts of interest: “Goldman Sachs apparently failed to declare a potential conflict of interest which resulted in pushing up the cost of a £23.5billion bail-out of Lloyds Banking Group, City sources claimed last night. The allegation that the Wall Street bank may have put its own interests ahead of its British clients comes just a week after it was accused of fraud in the US.” [April 2010]
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1268378/Goldman-Sachs-conflict-inflated-Lloyds-bail-costs.html

Yet another thread where Bob is incapable of staying on the subject. Have you even anywhere on the thread addressed the argument in the OP? Just waffling irrelevance about Tesco market share and bank mis-selling. Moreover, mis-selling where the affected are being given billions in compensation. When was the last time the NHS compensated someone for their outpatients appointment being late? Should education departments compensate kids when they leave school with no qualifications? Listing bad things done by the private sector is completely irrelevant and playing mindless games like that can be done quite literally to death. Tesco did not poison someones saline drip, an NHS employee did that. None of the banks killed elderly patients through lethal injections, that was a GP.

None of this is remotely relevant. The point is that top-down British statism has been a failure. Do you have anything relevant to say about what should replace statism ?

@Richard W: “Yet another thread where Bob is incapable of staying on the subject . . . None of this is remotely relevant”

That’s just your usual bombastic rubbish to deny documented facts in the public domain which you regard as inconvenient to your cause.

What I posted @14 and @22 is very much to the point that self-regulation of markets by capitalist enterprises isn’t effective in preventing abuses of market power and exploitation of customers.

That’s why regulation by public agencies is necessary to preserve social well-being. Unregulated, free market capitalism isn’t in the public interest. For more on the theme of banks and bankers, try this news report in the FT on 20 July 2011, just a few days ago:

“The financial and insurance sector paid out £14bn in bonuses in the last financial year, unchanged from the year before, despite government pressure on banks to curb excessive pay-outs.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e2e673ae-b22a-11e0-9d80-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1SyFcsMFw

The bankers are still playing the same game of privatising the gains while expecting that any unbearable losses will be socialised because the government of the day will promptly step in to bail out the illiquid or insolvent bank with public money to maintain the systemic stability of financial markets. That – and the abuses of market power by retail banks in one of the most concentrated markets in affluent peer-group economies – is what makes British banking so profitable compared with banking systems in those peers.

“Statism” is just a vague term of abuse without testable meaning – just like the claim that it is unlucky to walk under ladders. The macroeconomic stabilisation policies of the Thatcher governments through the 1980s were thoroughly confused and muddled but it doesn’t follow that it has to be that way.

The problem here is that for the past few decades we’ve had a whole gerneration of politicians both Tory and New Labour who have decided to prostitute themselves to the interests of bankers, media tycoons and global corporations, and cater to their every whim. To the extent that the state is now little more than a vehicle for protecting the intersts of the elites.

Trouble is, people are beginning to notice.

@23

The point is that top-down British statism has been a failure. Do you have anything relevant to say about what should replace statism ?

Well that is a contentious claim in itself, how exactly do you define ‘failiure’ since the ‘top down statism’ of which you speak successfully got us through two world wars, and built and managed enduring and popular national institutions like the NHS.

The answer is, nothing is going to “replace statism” the only relevant question is how or whether the state could be organised better, and/or if it could be more effective if more power was decentralised.

But the thing about these episodes is that the state has been a key player in effecting this redistribution towards the rich. The free market right and the statist left are, then, guilty of similar errors. Just as the right fails to see that “free markets” can be a means whereby capitalists exercise power over workers, so the statist left fails to see that the state can also be such a means.

I don’t think so. Wasn’t this the sort of thing (from memory) that Marx talked about. How the state could become captured by and used as a tool of the ruling class? And how it was neccesary for the working class to capture it etc etc.

The problem as In said is the corruption of our political establishment by big money and big corporations, of which the current News International scandal is but the tip of an iceberg.

Thing is, people are beginning to notice which way our political class is facing and the elites and their cronies are starting to become nervous that people are starting to notice this. Hence this article in the telegraph.

Doublessly the elites will try to use their power over the media to try and divert the attention of the populace away from themselves. You can expect increasingly desperate attempts at this in the coming years. Rather like the absurd claim that the global recession was caused by Labour ‘overspending’ and nothing to do with bankers. Or the current attempt to demonise benefits claiments.

Paul Newman

“It is a measure of quite how out of the game New Labour are in the South especially that Cameron can treat his own that way without fear”

I suppose the point I’m making is that these people – middle class households on mid-to-high five-figure incomes – are not and have never been the Tories’ own. What they have traditionally been is ‘useful idiots’, flattered into believing they belong to a club that wouldn’t even let them through the door. The Tories’ own are a much rarer breed, not encountered by most people in their everyday lives but from which the party’s leadership is almost exclusively drawn – households on six-figure-plus incomes to whom it is a matter of complete indifference if their local state school doesn’t get rebuilt, or waiting lists climb at their local NHS hospital, but who care deeply about keeping taxes low in order to protect their personal wealth.

@28: ” . . but who care deeply about keeping taxes low in order to protect their personal wealth.”

Time to quote the Daily Mail:

The coalition of millionaires: 23 of the 29 member of the new cabinet are worth more than £1m… and the Lib Dems are just as wealthy as the Tories
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1280554/The-coalition-millionaires-23-29-member-new-cabinet-worth-1m–Lib-Dems-just-wealthy-Tories.html

26. Graham

” Well that is a contentious claim in itself, how exactly do you define ‘failiure’ since the ‘top down statism’ of which you speak successfully got us through two world wars, and built and managed enduring and popular national institutions like the NHS.

The answer is, nothing is going to “replace statism” the only relevant question is how or whether the state could be organised better, and/or if it could be more effective if more power was decentralised. ”

Graham, in the aftermath of WW2 the NHS was built. However, other comparable nations managed to build even better healthcare systems. Statism in the same era also managed to build a lot of crap houses which did not stand the test of time. Moreover, in the era of planning they managed to build the ugliest buildings in the history of humanity. Large-scale state involvement may have been appropriate post-WW2 does not mean it is appropriate in the internet age.

The NHS is a popular institution and doctors have public approval around 90, politicians around 20. The 20 approval rating is a rejection of statism because politicians in most peoples eyes are the state. Doctors and by extension the NHS is something that will help you in times of need and people like those who help them.

The point I am making is not about how we dismantle the state, but how do we make it better for the era that we live in. We have developed a nomenklatura system and the only people who can’t see it are lefties who have become the defenders of the nomenklatura. If you are a Labour supporter your own leader says Labour are becoming the party of public sector workers and benefit claimants. The problem is eighty per cent of the workforce do not work in the public sector and most people are not benefit claimants. Just on here for example, some people speak about nothing but the public sector and benefits because they have no new ideas how to improve the lives of anyone else.

One could be forgiven for believing that some on the left believe the economy can consist of the NHS, green energy, the local council and benefits. They have no new ideas how to make things better and are openly hostile to anyone outside the aforementioned. The most obvious example of statism is we have the worst planning system in the mature industrial world where NIMBY’s and BANANA’s run amok. Just abolishing the whole lot and starting again would be an improvement. The tax system is an Byzantine complexity mess. Where are the lefty ideas for simplifying the tax system to get the right incentives in place and reduce the tax burden for the £25-30k workers with a family.

Little Finland has arguably the best education system in the world. It would probably conform strongly to the type of things that the left like. Does anyone on the left go to Finland to see what they do right and try to learn from them? If Finland are doing statism, they are doing statism better than we do statism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland

fuck off

my non existant twitter akso says

f`uc““““k `o`ff

“what can be done to prevent [wealthy] capitalists from capturing the state?”

therefore also, and equally,

“what can be done to stop [powerful] corporations from capturing the market?”

Or,

“why shouldn’t more effort be made to better balance them rather than on [futile] attempts to stop them altogether?”

I’d enjoy watching the competition commission grapple with the constitution!

GO- The Labour Party has lost support some way down the income scale from that . Working class home owners in the private sector are equally, if not more anti Labour.
In fact a high tax administration hits people with middling incomes hardest, as an opportunity cost, but they get no more than the wealthy and their differentials and goals are mocked by the hand-outs around them. Your top 1% are rarely met because they are rare .They are not where Labour goes for money …there is only one place , where all the people are , in the middle .
Useful idiots in a sense yes,cash cows is another way of putting it.

Richard W @8:

Capitalists are not persecuting and imprisoning them for consuming drugs. The state and its agencies do those things.

Up to here I thought you were going pretty well but here you have most certainly missed your mark. The extent to which the state operates as an agent for capital interests has been recently illustrated by various aspects of Hackgate, as if we needed reminding (given that the MP’s Expenses scandal was also about legitimised bribery). The War on Drugs most certainly is maintained to serve the interests of capital

Pharmaceutical companies don’t want people growing their own anti-depressants, which have less side-effects. Alcohol & tobacco are very happy with their status as the only drug pushers acceptable to post-Puritan culture, and pour vast sums of money into lobbying against drug liberalisation to maintain that status. The industrial complex developed around specialist law-enforcement equipment is vast.

Bear in mind that marijuana was banned over the objections of the AMA, after lies in Congress, and through a 3-year propaganda campaign launched by arch-capitalist W. R. Hearst, because he didn’t like Mexicans and Anslinger was handing him instant racial criminalisation.

Regarding the original Torygraph article, there were several things in it that interested me but none more so than the observation by Moore that New Labour were functionally a right-wing party. I’ve been saying that for over a decade, and kept being told (by Sunny, among others) that I was wrong… even the Tories have now noticed that Blair & Brown were secretly on their side all along.

@30 Richard W

Statism in the same era also managed to build a lot of crap houses which did not stand the test of time. Moreover, in the era of planning they managed to build the ugliest buildings in the history of humanity. Large-scale state involvement may have been appropriate post-WW2 does not mean it is appropriate in the internet age.

Well actually, council housing constructed by the 1940s Labour government, was built to fairly high standards which were mandated by Aneurin Bevan who was the minister responsible. When the right to buy legislation was introduced. The 1940s council houses were the most saught after.

The quality of council housing deteriorated substantially under the conservative governments of the 1950s under Harold MacmIllan who built a far higher amount of housing mainly by lowering standards and specifications and concentrating on building cheap and nasty tower blocks. This policy was continued by the 60s Labour government until the Ronan Point accident in the late 60s, where a small gas explosion caused a large chunk of a tower block to collapse, killing several people, revealing just how shoddy they were.

One could be forgiven for believing that some on the left believe the economy can consist of the NHS, green energy, the local council and benefits. They have no new ideas how to make things better and are openly hostile to anyone outside the aforementioned.

Well we certainly know what not to do. New Labour’s brilliant idea about the economy was to give up on the Left’s traditional belief that capitalism was fundementally destructive and had to be controlled for the common good, and instead decided to roll over and capitulate completely to the whims of capital in the hope that they would pay the bills. For about a decade until 2008 it appeared to work, until its fundemental flaws were revealed. And now people are starting to come round to the view that the left might have had a point after all.

“the Left’s traditional belief that capitalism was fundamentally destructive”

This is where confusion has traditionally arisen, because if it’s destructive it is by definition not capitalist.