Today's eternal truth - free markets reduce inequality

This can't be said too often - but too many folk from left, right and centre seem incapable of grasping the cause of inequality:

But extreme inequality is in fact caused by insufficient competition. Given that competition is the lifeblood of capitalism, it follows that inequality is the result, not of capitalism, but of a lack of capitalism.

This is why we need free markets (and why equal societies like Denmark and Sweden have them) - not so evil business people can make bigger profits but because they lead to fairer societies. Big business - you only have to look at the CBI's enthusiasm for mercantilist, protectionist policies - loves the sort of back-slapping, lobby-dominated, regulation-heavy arrangements that the US federal government and the EU are so keen on.

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There's been plenty of economic progress since 2008 - you're just not measuring it

The problem with economics, I find, is that too often it becomes trapped inside the limits of what it measures. If we haven't attached a specific monetary value to something then the economist's assumption all too often is that this something therefore has no value. Take childcare for example - government recognises that looking after young children has a cost but only when that looking after is done by an agency external to the family. We therefore provide subsidy to people using that external agency but not to the people who choose to provide the childcare themselves. I may be wrong but it does seem that the driver here - glossed over by debates about getting women back to work (as if looking after children isn't work) - is that the only measure that counts is GDP. And there's a double win by the parent returning to work by using a childcare agency - not only does her return raise GDP because she's in the part of society we measure but the purchase of childcare raises that GDP too. It's taking in eachothers washing on a grand scale but it make the figures look good. Better stills we can throw chaff about women's equality into the mix to make it look like a social good.

One theme popular right now with some economists is the argument that there has been no "progress" since 2008's great crash. Those economists point to per capita GDP proclaiming 'look no increase in productivity' because those figures seem to have stagnated. The problem here is that it's a one-eyed look at people's lives - measuring only the money income and not what that money income gets us. It's true that average incomes haven't risen but to say there has been no progress ("the final crisis of late capitalism") is hard to argue.

Until recently I was a director of a large social housing organisation and, in preparation for the shift to universal credit and the digital-by-default approach it uses, we looked at how ready our customers were for the change, the degree to which they were digitally-enabled. What we found was nearly 9 in 10 of the tenants had access to the Internet, most commonly using a smart-phone. Bear in mind that we are literally dealing with the poorest in society - three-quarters of our tenants relied on benefits. I realised why when I dropped my (expensive) phone in a car park and it smashed.

My temporary fix was to buy - yes buy - a phone for £20 and stick a sim card in it. And this wasn't the cheapest smart-phone. For £25 I had a phone allowing me access (albeit slightly slow) to the whole of the Internet's wonders. I'd venture to suggest that this wasn't possible in 2008 and those poor and vulnerable people in our flats and houses have had their lives made significantly better by being able to afford the benefits of Internet technology previously only available to the wealthy.

Take a walk round your house, look at the things that have changed - become cheaper and better in equal measures. Televisions, fridges, microwave ovens, dishwashers. Open the apps on your cheap smart phone and see the things you've got for free - music streaming, social media, football scores and updates, bus timetables, maps, radio. I've a super little bluetooth speaker, better sound quality than any transistor radio of my youth - cost me £9.99.

Pop down to the supermarket and walk round. Tens of thousands of lines, produce from across the world and at prices little higher than a decade ago. Add in cheaper taxis from Uber, cheap home delivery takeaway food, online retailing driving down costs and prices. Thousands of small changes each one providing a little more value to us as people often for a little less cost.

So when people say "there's no productivity growth" are they really telling the truth? Perhaps - hallelujah - the productivity growth is coming in people's private lives not in the dull Taylorist world of the workplace. The last ten years have seen massive advances in people's lives, what we get for our money means we're better off even if that money's still the same. Today's TV isn't the same as the telly of ten years ago (it's flat, smart and hung on the wall). Today's mobile phone isn't really a phone, it's a computer more powerful than the PCs and laptops of ten years ago.

All this is hard to measure (how to calculate the benefit I get from wasting so much time on Facebook and Twitter) so mostly we don't bother. And this lets people get away with spouting manifest nonsense like this from Delphine Strauss in the FT:

Absolute social mobility — people’s chances of living better than their parents — has worsened almost everywhere since the financial crisis.

Our children and grandchildren are likely to enjoy a vastly better life than us enjoying things we can only speculate about. For sure there's an outside chance of the Marxist wet dream coming about and capitalism completely collapsing but it's one of those sort of outside chances that brought Ford, Zaphod, Arthur and Tricia together - damned close to infinitely improbable. And so long as capitalism continues it will carry on creating, innovating, initiating - doing the thing it has done for three hundred years: making us all happier, healthier and wealthier. Long may it continue.

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Truth - everyone is doing better here than anybody has ever done

I'll admit to finding Jordan Peterson a little irritating (and maybe a tad puritan) but this is absolutely true:

"Everyone is doing better here than anybody has ever done on the face of the planet throughout recorded history, and the whole West is like that!" he told me. "To call that all a tyrannical patriarchy is indicative of a very deep resentment and ahistorical ignorance that's so profound that it's indistinguishable from willful blindness."

Amidst all the cries of poverty and austerity, we should keep reminding ourselves - as Barak Obama observed - that if someone in the West is given the whole of history to choose the best time to be born, they should choose now. We have become trapped in a sort of depressive ennui about our societies, focused only on their failings and, worse still, blaming those failings on the success.

Every problem from teenage pregnancy through drug addiction to problems with train timetables is blamed on capitalism, neoliberalism or austerity. It's probably not true that any of these things are to blame but it sets a tone that, if we smash the golden egg that made us rich (free market capitalism), all these things will go away. The problem is that the people waving the hammers at that egg want to replace it with a different, rotten, egg called socialism - something we know creates inequality, division, death and starvation.

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Why I'm proud to be British - and why you should be too

There was one of those polls - not sure of its provenance or how its sample was constructed - that asked what things made people most proud to be British. The poll included assorted military victories (the Armada, Napoleon, WW2), having an Empire, the Magna Carta, Suffragettes and gay rights. Oh, plus the NHS.

Here's the result - unsurprisingly (and significantly) biased towards the more recent:





Now I'm not really convinced that creating the NHS is such a stellar achievement - it's notable that pretty much everywhere else in the world hasn't copied our system. Even the places with government services more-or-less designed by UK bureaucrats after WW2. But it does remind me of the extent to which the NHS is the most sacred of our sacred cows.

The thing, however, that bothers me isn't how the vote turned out but rather the huge - enormous and glaring - omission from the list. Not inventions or inventors - although we've plenty of those. Not social systems like the welfare state, for all their value and importance. Not sporting achievements (including inventing most of the sports we don't achieve in very much). Not education or research or literature (shouldn't Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens and Tolkien be on that list?) or music or art.

No. The thing that should make us Britons most proud is the thing that allows us to pay for the NHS. That supports our great education system. That provides for the welfare state. That funds our wonderful culture. The thing we've exported all around the world and which pays for other places health, welfare, culture and education. This thing also means most people - firstly in Britain, then in the USA and across Europe then Japan, now in China, India and a hundred other places - are no longer living in abject poverty scratting a meagre and short life from subsistence farming. This is what the British did first and that changed the world completely - for the better.

We call it free market capitalism and it is brilliant.

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Statistics are altogether too bourgeois for the public sector elite

I've been thinking for a while about Graeme Archer's article on how 'getting' statistics is as important as 'getting' Shakespeare yet people still, in that giggling way, exclaim how they were never any good at maths.

There is no “either/or” between words and numbers; at the same time, of course, there is. CP Snow’s two cultures exist, most clearly in the words/numbers dichotomy, but only because we structure them into existence through conscious decisions about how to educate our young. It’s a human choice, not a law of the universe. Good with words or good with numbers is a story we tell about ourselves, and like all stories it has its heroes, and villains.

Now I'm a social scientist (if I'm anything properly academic) who once gloried in the title of Research and Planning Director and I recall a number - see what I did there - of stories about folk dumbfounded by maths and stats. We once prepared an analysis of customer geography for a knitting wool company (sexy, eh!) based on a simple index and had to spend the first twenty minutes of the presentation explaining what indices were. And when I did my 'Research Methods' module for my MSc, we were told to avoid quantitative research because (I summarise) maths is hard and you don't need to do it.

Such is the reality of a world where my personal experience of buying a railway ticket is a better guide to policy than statistics explaining why I am an outlier in buying such an expensive ticket. Or where - as I put it in a debate at last year's Battle of Ideas:

We’d reckon on uplift in response of around 2X or maybe 3X compared to a random selection. Great until you realise that the response to random was around 0.2% - all that clever technology means that, instead of getting ignored by 998 out of 1000 people, you only get ignored by 994.

Only the 2X or 3X gets reported not the actual numbers even though they tell us we needn't fret so much.

Statistics matter yet the extent to which we understand them or appreciate them is troubling. I recall being told - in very definite terms - that my comments on the relative poverty line were wrong because I was using the median household income not the mean and "median isn't an average". This is despite the fact that median is the right measure where there's a lower bound (i.e. you can't have a negative household income - which might come as a surprise to bankrupts).

The thing with Graeme's article, however, is not that people don't know enough maths and statistics but that they are proud of this fact. And, you know, I might have just found a little glimpse at the reasons why this is the case - numbers, counting, accounting are terribly bourgeois things. Here's a chunk from a chapter in Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Equality (the chapter is entitled 'Aristocrats Scorned Measurement'):

In England before its bourgeois time Roman numerals prevailed. Shakespeare's opening chorus in Henry V...apologises for showing battles without Cecil B. DeMillean numbers of extras: yet "a crooked figure may/ Attest in little place a million/ And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, / On your imaginary forces work." The crooked figure he has in mind is not Arabic "1,000,000" but merely a scrawled Roman M with a bar over it to signify "multiplied by 1,000": 1,000 times 1,000 is a million.

McCloskey - like Graeme Archer - quotes Samuel Johnson (albeit a different reference):

"To count is a modern practice, the ancient method was to guess; and when numbers are guessed they are always magnified."

And that modernity was, in Johnson's time, the advent of Bourgeois England - Capitalist England (although McCloskey would be cross at the sloppiness of this latter designation). Before this time, accounting was a grubby thing of merchants, pursers and bursers not something the great and good should be bothered with. Indeed, McCloskey goes on to note that, prior to 1803, students arriving at Yale were expected to be fluent in Latin and Greek but not to be qualified in arithmetic. Such mundane things as statistics were beneath such grand folk.

We appear to have come full circle with quoting poetry and qualitative (for which, usually, read anecdotal) analysis given greater credence than any sort of proper measurement, analysis and appraisal based on statistics, probabilities and other scary number-crunching things. As Simon Jenkins disdainfully put it (when it seemed his basic statistical knowledge was found wanting):

I seriously doubt this poll, since it implies that two-thirds did know the answers. All on whom I tested it failed, including myself. Nor could they see the point. With one voice they replied: “That’s the sort of thing you learned at school.” So what is the point?

What were the sorts of question? Calculating the mean, median and mode - terms used every day in the Guardian where Jenkins writes. The area of a circle. And even long division and multiplication. Not even GCSE maths, not much advanced on what we'd like an eleven year old to know. We don't need to know this stuff, say the bookish elite, it's smelly maths.

Yet how can you know whether government policies - reducing poverty, improving health and so forth - are effective if you've no idea how the things we're reducing or improving are measured? I'll tell you how - we use anecdote, stories. So, rather than look at the statistics we relate the tale of someone's grandma or how a single mum is struggling on benefits. We sometimes gather together several of such stories and embellish them with commentary from 'experts' relating their own understanding based on further anecdote - or 'qualitative research' as they like to call it.

Statistics, maths, measurement, accounting, calculation - these are the tools of the capitalist, the merchant, the city trader. Thing to be disdained and dismissed in favour of our, often pre-judged, opinion founded on at best a reasoned assessment but more commonly on a collection of tales. We might then hold our noses and wander into the world of maths seeking out some numbers that seem to match what we've found from our tales. People compare apples with pears, use percentages when the numbers are too small for this to make sense, and calculate means when the bounds make the mean meaningless. Journalists - often with the title Science Editor or Health Correspondent - present headlines that bear no relationship to the research they report on. Not because they want to mislead but because they've no idea what 'statistical significance' means let alone what a p value is.

Hardly a day passes without us witnessing people in powerful and influential positions dismissing the evidence of statistics in favour of anecdote and conjecture. And, so long as people can respond by quoting Disraeli - lies, damned lies and statistics - without being laughed at, there is little chance that we'll see the proper use of measurement in the formulation of public policy. Meanwhile, out in the world of markets, capitalism, trade and investment, people have no choice but to use measurement and statistics, without them they would fail. For the public sector elite, however, such concerns are just too bourgeois and instead they make policy inspired by stories in the Guardian or Daily Mail.

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The appeal of autocracy to intellectuals

Joel Kotkin is bang on the money here:

China’s ascendency appeals to many in America’s intellectual classes, and not only them, who historically have a soft spot for “enlightened” autocrats and overweening bureaucracies. In the progressive era, the lodestone was imperial Germany, in the 1930s for many the “future” was to be seen in the Soviet Union and even fascist Italy. In the 1980s, Japan emerged as the role model, followed in the late 1990s by a united Europe that seemed to many more humane and successful than the U.S.

The reality is that, for all its many flaws and failings, the US system based on liberal capitalism is more robust, responsive and successful than the Utopian "Man in Whitehall Knows Better" systems beloved of the centrist and progressive left - especially the acedemic and intellectual bits of it.

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It's not capitalism we need to defend, it's freedom

Every now and then I get asked about why I'm in politics and, once I've done the self-deprecating bit about how no other business would have me, I get to the crunch. I am involved because free speech, free markets, free trade and free enterprise need defending. The systems of government, the lobby groups, the business organisations, the voluntary sector and 'thinking people everywhere' all conspire to limit and restrict your and my freedom to act. Challenging this sad truth is essential.

And the problem isn't capitalism, it's government. This isn't to say that big business is innocent - the amounts spent by business on lobbying government for law changes, subsidy, new trade barriers and more regulation remind us that many large organisations really don't like the idea of freedom. So when Corbyn-loving students tell me capitalism is corrupting, I get their point - hardly a day passes without one or other example of a big business getting some sort of protectionist fix or some new regulation aimed at preventing market entry. We've known this for a long while - it's the central theme of Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations' - mercantilism, market fixing, cartels and protectionism, all those things the technocrats try to justify, prevent the growth of wealth, the opportunity for equality and the raising of people out of poverty.

I also understand how those young people are disgruntled at being 'Generation Rent', at having great fat student debt they probably won't pay off and at seeing my generation sitting snuggly on a pile of assets (but still moaning at having to use those assets to look after ourselves in our old age). But when Corbyn or other socialists try to say that these problems are some how a consequence of free markets, free trade or free enterprise, they are lying - even when they use the catch-all term of capitalism.

Housing in London is expensive because for sixty years we've run urban containment policies around the capital and for forty of those sixty years, London has generated more new jobs than it has new houses. And if you provide just six new homes for every ten new households, housing is going to get more expensive. This isn't the fault of the market, it's the fault of government for rationing the land we've got to build houses on. They call this planning and it's the basic building block of socialism - instead of having a free market, some folk in an office with a computer model decide what the price should be, how much should be made and how it should be distributed. It limits your freedom and it doesn't work.

Defending freedom is not, therefore, simply about the moral imperative of liberty but is justified for straightforward and practical reasons. Those freedoms - speech, trade, markets, enterprise - should be defended because they work, because they are the things that made us rich and, right now, are making poor people everywhere richer. The only places - North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe - where people are getting poorer are places where these freedoms are comprehensively rejected. Places where socialism - the planned economy - is the chosen model.

Everywhere I look freedom is under attack. Technocrats and business lobbyists saying import tariffs protect domestic business. Local councils saying limiting procurement options supports local economies. Planners saying the problem is the wrong plan not the planning itself. Farmers saying they couldn't operate without subsidy. Public health groups wanting to ban smoking in parks or to fix booze prices. Police forces calling for new powers to seemingly arrest anybody for almost anything. Housing lobbyists saying the solution is to fix rents not to build houses. Schools snatching sausage rolls from innocent children's lunchboxes. Mayors enforcing public morals by banning pretty women from advertising or drinking from the train.

And then we're told the problem is capitalism? It's not, the problem is that government - in cahoots with a bewildering lobby of charities, businesses and 'campaigners' - takes away freedoms. And we can't subdivide these freedoms - be cross about the loss of one freedom that's important to us while cheering on a ban on something we don't like. For sure some of these losses of freedom are less damaging than others but each loss - from daft rules on advertising vaping to 'Public Space Protection Orders' that make anything an official doesn't like a crime - represents a further restriction and another barrier to pleasure, enterprise or exchange.

I'm happy to defend capitalism - the idea that the rewards from business success goes to the people who put up the cash - but it's not as important as defending free markets, free trade, free enterprise and free speech. Those freedoms constrain the worst urges of business, protect us from the busybody and limit the oppressive instincts of government. We have become too glib about each new loss of freedom - even sometimes to the point of welcoming it because of the NHS or crime or community safety or, the favourite all-purpose reason, because of the children.

So let's get less hung up about whether something's owned by the people who invested, by the workforce or by the community and worry instead about those who want to take away your freedom to organise business how you want. Let's be bothered about government and business wanting to fix gas prices or food supply or where you can buy gin and lemonade. The good life we enjoy and that we'd like everyone to enjoy, was made possible by that free enterprise, by those free markets, and by that free trade. And underpinning all this is free speech - our right to speak what we see as truth, to promote our business and to challenge the assumptions and presumptions of those who govern us. Freedom matters - let's defend it.

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Ten common lies about about free markets, capitalism and liberal society

Every day - in the papers, on the telly and all over social media - a bunch of people tell a pack of lies about free markets, capitalism and the liberal enlightenment that made us all rich, is still helping make the poor less poor and the rich happier. The Clerisy, as Deirdre McCloskey calls them, having got themselves secure, often tax-funded positions spend their time sneering at the things that made their comfortable lives possible. Hipsterish, right-on web-design consultants and the like go on about the evils of capitalism while plying their lucrative businesses in that capitalist world.

This makes me angry. It's not the hypocrisy, we've all a tendency that way. It's not the smugness, annoying though it often is. And it's not that, as my Dad was wont to say, "they can afford to be socialists". No, it's the lies. Here are ten of them.

The First Lie - Free markets are a bad thing.

Please explain which part of the word 'free' is a bad thing? If you don't like free markets, what you want is markets that aren't free. Markets where only some privileged people can trade. Markets where someone else (usually the government) sets the price. Markets where their effectiveness is determined not by the actions of those in the market but by who is most effective at lobbying - for which read bribing, corrupting - government. If you fetter free markets (which given you always go on about the free market being "unfettered" is what you want) what you create are winners and losers, privileged and unprivileged, rather than having a system where people seek co-operation and mutual benefit. Freedom is a good thing. Free markets are a good thing. So stop lying about this and undermining the liberty of your neighbour.

The Second Lie - Capitalism is exploitative

We hear this all the time. Whether it's about the planet, the workers or some vague and general exploitation. Well it ain't so. Capitalism is a simple concept where things are owned by the people who stump up the resources for those things to be there. Not just cash but ideas, innovation, skills and enthusiasm. No-one's being exploited here and capitalism delivers returns to investors - in doing so it helps make those innovations succeed and those free markets make us all richer.

The Third Lie - We are rich through exploiting other humans

Quite the reverse. The thing that the liberal enlightenment did was demonstrate that the best way to get rich is to help make other folks' lives better. That was Adam Smith's great insight, not the 'invisible hand' but rather the realisation that personal self-interest operating in a free system leads to social betterment. When people point, quite rightly, to the horrors of colonialism and imperialism they are wrong to see in them the reason for our wealth. Some people made money screwing over Africans and Indians but this money was - even at the height of Lord Clive's egregious pillage of India - marginal to England's wealth and economic growth.

The Fourth Lie - Government creates wealth

We need government to protect the liberal society that allows free markets and capitalism to work. The ancient - and it is ancient - system of contracts, laws and administration that protects property was turned (mostly but not always) away from protecting the landed and towards supporting that free society and its mundane trading transactions. But government doesn't create wealth - we had hundreds of years of contract law, the Magna Carta and all that jazz without seeing the transformation wrought by capitalism and free markets. And we had plenty of government inventions during that time - from gunpowder to haute cuisine - without those inventions making the mass of people rich.

The Fifth Lie - Capitalism kills people

All the time you're talking about 'capitalism's death toll' without ever pointing to the bit when liberal society, free markets and capitalism killed these people. Indeed quite the opposite. All the advances in medicine, sanitation and safety made possible by being richer - that's the fruit of capitalism even if we choose to organise these things through government. Since the millennium a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty because of those free markets, free trade and capitalism. Capitalism saves lives.

The Sixth Lie - Capitalists are greedy

Again quite the opposite is true. Capitalism expects that, instead of swimming backstroke in his gold pile, Scrooge McDuck invests his cash. Some of this is invested in boring old working capital and some in high risk, exciting, sexy, hipster innovation. You and I prefer the safe stuff because we've not much to spare let alone risk but Scrooge McDuck can take bigger risks because losing a bit is less of a big deal. Those filthy rich plutocrats (the anonymous pinstriped banker ones are the worst) you rile against are stumping up the investment needed to deliver economic growth, health, wealth and happiness. Moreover they're putting off having something now (spending all that gold) to take a risk hoping that they'll get a bigger return in the future. Because of this all those exciting, innovative businesses happen. This is not greed.

The Seventh Lie - Small businesses aren't capitalists

Now this lie is more inferred that explicit. Bad capitalism is about faceless, distant businesses not our friend's web design business or the trendy coffee shop where you meet to discuss revolution and the evils of free markets. Sorry to disappoint but you're all capitalists and it's in all your interests for that capitalist system to operate as openly and freely as possible.

The Eighth Lie - Trade is something permitted by government

This lie sits behind all the talk of trade deals and the nonsense about a 'global race' so loved by politicians and pundits. Trade is quite simply the process of exchange in a free market (or even in a not-so-free market). We want government to back up our exchange by protecting property rights, preventing theft and ensuring we can enforce a contract. But we don't want the government to say who can and cannot trade or when and where they can trade. Trade is more often prevented by government than enabled. If we want more growth, more riches, the way to go is less prevention and more enablement.

The Ninth Lie - The rich are rich because others are poor

Free markets prevent this from happening. It used to be so before we woke up and realised that posh folk owning all the land and getting peasants to scrat in it wasn't the best way to a wealthy, healthy and successful society. We used to have a system - called it feudalism, oikocracy, whatever - that meant some folk were rich because others were poor. It had lasted from the first cities in the middle east through to the Dutch Republic. Then some places realised (partly government, partly people thinking about a better world) that the way to get rich was to try and make everybody better off. And it worked. We call this system liberal capitalism.

The Tenth Lie - Free marketeers don't care

How often to you say this? Every time something fails, most usually some or other government administrative system. This because of capitalism, we're told. Free markets did this. Because they don't care. If they cared nothing would ever fail. No-one would be poor. This is the biggest of these lies. Free marketers do care. That's why we're capitalists. We want everyone to be healthier, wealthier and happier. And because free markets work people in Britain are vastly healthier, wealthier and happier than our forebears.


By all means disagree. Feel free to stick with your faith that there is some sort of Utopia, some system - True Socialism maybe - that will give even more social benefit, wealth, health and happiness than free markets, capitalism and our liberal society. But stop lying about free markets, capitalism and that liberal society. Stop fibbing that it's anything other than the more successful, more effective and long-lasting means of bettering the lives of ordinary people.

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Young people are neoliberals - they just don't realise it yet so let's help them.

It seems to me that the real issue young people have is feeling excluded from the benefits of our capitalist, neoliberal society not that capitalist, neoliberal society itself. And this seems a reasonable gripe to me. Here's a tweet from lefty journalist John Elledge:




This - perhaps not all that considered - comment tells us a great deal. Mostly that the real irritation of the emerging graduate generation is that they feel unable to afford investment assets like houses. For me this is one of the essential failures of UK government over the last thirty years - the idea of a property owning democracy was ignored as we got ever more excited about the seemingly endless rise in house prices.

Some people want to blame all this on my generation - the boomers - who took advantage of cheap asset prices in the 1970s and 1980s and rode the bubble to the point where the house my Dad bought for £3,250 in 1963 in now 'worth' over £400,000 (Dad sold the house in 1975 for about £14,000). I am absolutely with all those people who feel that they're outside this bubblicious world - not just the young or poor but a whole load of people from 'Up North' who've not seen anything like the gains those 'Down South' have seen.

Add to this that we told young people that the way to get into this bubble world was to get a good degree (in fact any old degree as Blair's enthusiasm for book-learning led to the numbers going to university getting up towards half of 18 and 19 year olds). And because these degrees were the gateway to a world of wealth and power, we told young people they could have a load of (cheap) borrowing that they'd spend half their life paying off so as to get the degree.

Young people don't want to be socialists, they want the entrance fee to our neoliberal world of valuable assets, to that property-owning democracy we were all promised. And this is why they've dumped the capitalists, the people who they think are stopping them from joining the glorious free market rat race. "Have free university tuition". "Here's a subsidised mortgage". "How about a big pay rise". "Or a higher minimum wage". "Free child care". "Discounted rail travel"...

It doesn't matter how much others ask where all this cash is coming from, people aren't listening. Or rather they see those telephone number house prices and say, "y'all can afford to pay for this stuff, get on with it". And Labour offered them everything they were asking for and some things they weren't - no questions asked. Is it any surprise that folk who are outside that wealth bubble flocked to this banner?

Young people - and plenty of the not-so-young - want to know when it's their turn to play the free market, asset-owning, property-speculating game. They don't want socialism, they want what their parents and grandparents had - the chance to have a real cash stake in their society, the thing that Margaret Thatcher promised to my generation (and largely delivered). This isn't about nationalisation for all that people tell you the government should run stuff (they always have done by the way even at the height of Maggie's pomp). No, it's about us renewing the promise we made to the post-war generation and to late boomers like me - play your part, work hard, be a good citizen and we'll make sure you can have that real cash stake in Britain.

Right now we're still telling people to play their part, to work hard, to borrow to fund education and to be a good citizen but government has reneged on its side of the bargain, that cash stake in Britain. And the single-minded focus of any new government should be to renew that offer and make it work. Those young people really aren't baby ideologues desperate for some sort of socialist New Jerusalem. They're just like you and I were 30, 40, 50 or 60 years ago - bothered about our own futures, the things we care about, in that thing Adam Smith saw as the driver of a better, richer society: self-interest.

So let's start offering people that chance. Let's free up the planning system so more houses get built were people want to live. Let's revisit the idea of tax relief or other support that backs individual, personal investment in our society. Let's liberate the innovative instincts of property and finance people to meet the aspirations of today's ambitious young people - 21st century capitalists, budding neoliberals every one. And let's do this knowing that the alternative, Labour's market-fixing, price-controlling, 'magic money tree' programme carries in it the seeds of disaster, the crash that socialism always brings.

I'm with you if you want to bash at those folk farming grants and corporate welfare. I'm on your side if you want to try and stop well-funded lobbyists getting government to fix a market or a system to suit their clients. I'm right there if what you want is to stop rent-seekers freeloading on free health, welfare and education. And I agree with you when you say people should pay the taxes they owe - on the nail not just after a long-winded and expensive investigation.

But this isn't about socialism just about getting a free market that works for all of us. It's about setting economic liberty - the idea that, more than anything else, is responsible for the health and wealth nearly all of us enjoy today (even if we can't afford a house) - at the heart of government policy. The more we try to control the market the less liberty we have and the more power we hand to the commissioners, the lobbyists and the corporations protected by the government fix.

What we all want is a real stake in the nation we're a part of - not just a vague notion of citizenship but a real sense of being a part of the place, of having roots. And that means renewing that promise made by Harold MacMillan in the 1950s, by Ted Heath in 1970 and by Margaret Thatcher in 1983 - Britain isn't just land and institutions but its people, all of them. And all of them should have the chance to take a real, solid, tangible stake in their nation.

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Capitalism will save the world (if we let it)

We need to understand - and this isn't an argument for any variety of Brexit merely stating what will be - that global economic growth, driven for much of the great boom fuelled by us stopping with the world war rubbish, won't be coming from Europe or the USA.

28 March 2012 was a big day for mankind, according to some statisticians. It was the first day in modern history that developing countries were responsible for more than half of global GDP, up from 38 per cent 10 years earlier. This convergence makes sense. If people have freedom and access to knowledge, technology and capital, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to produce as much as people everywhere else. A country with a fifth of the world’s population should produce around a fifth of its wealth.

The success of global capitalism - of those greedy, rapacious business people exploiting stuff - is palpable. Levels of poverty - real grinding poverty, less than a couple of dollars a day - are now lower than at any time in human history. So my fellow capitalists, take a second out to pat yourselves on the back. Because it's not socialism, not the actions of government employees and not the decisions of politicians that has achieved this wonder. We did it, us capitalists. We got those poor people out of poverty. And left to our devices not only will the remaining 10% of really poor people be saved from that poverty but millions of others who are poor by our western standards will also clamber up onto that shining mountain that is our fabulous consumer society.

The jobs for us all is to stop the usual idiots - protectionists, socialists, Marxists, trade unions, aid workers, NGOs - from preventing capitalism from making all the world richer, happier and healthier. Let's do it.

....

Proper Jobs for Proper Blokes - thoughts on our robot future.

So we're having a cup of tea and a sausage sandwich as we wait out the hour before we get on the plane. And out the window we can see that typical airside scene with a bizarre collection of oddly shaped vehicles buzzing from hangers to planes, from terminals to hangers and on seemingly purposeless but I'm sure important trips elsewhere on the airport. Each one of those little vehicles is controlled by a man (and yes, as far as we could see, they were all men) and by the hanger doors there were other men. All sporting hi-vis clothing, heavy gloves and sensible boot-like footwear.

I don't know how many such men are employed at Leeds Bradford International Airport but they're pretty important to the smooth running of the enterprise - loading stuff on and off planes, waving things about to make sure everything goes in the right direction, hanging about in case there's a fire. A host of good old fashioned unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled manual labour. Proper jobs for proper blokes.

The thing is that, within a decade nearly all of these jobs will be gone. And, just as with mining, steel and shipbuilding, the big losers in this change will be working class men of a certain age. Too far away from retirement to just sack it all and put the feet up, too old and stuck to easily retrain for an unfamiliar, non-manual role. So just like those miners and steelworkers, we'll grow another cohort of resentful, unhealthy and unhappy men. Not just from the airport but men who once drove taxis, trains and buses, men who dug holes in roads, and men who sailed ships.

The future includes a scene where the product of an autonomous factory is loaded (automatically) onto a driverless truck which travels to an automated port to be transferred to a ship without a pilot which will take that product to another automated port, onto another driverless truck to an unmanned warehouse from where it's delivered to your house by a drone. Partly this is wonderful - a fulfilment of man's search to save labour so we can chill out with a beer. Partly it's terrifying, a dystopian, soul-less future without those 'proper jobs for proper blokes'.

We are doing too little thinking about this future. Not just how we make the undoubted economic gains that come from mechanisation, deskilling and robotics but how we share those gains across society without slaughtering the golden geese of our digital future. Some of this thinking is short term - what do we do for those proper blokes doing proper jobs at the airport, what work will there be for a future generation of less intelligent, less skilled men? Some of it is longer term - do we need a different approach to work, tax and responsibility in a world where most tasks are done by robots?

But in framing these thoughts we need to start by dealing with the things which aren't so - like us being more income poor:

Those of us who currently appear to have job security can more than likely look forward to making less in the future than we had once hoped we might. Over the last couple of decades, wages, adjusted for inflation, have scarcely grown throughout a broad range of rich countries, longer in some cases. And this wage stagnation has occurred alongside other distressing trends. The share of income flowing to workers, as opposed to business and property owners, has fallen. And, among workers, there has been a sharp rise in inequality, with the share of income going to those earning the highest incomes increasing in an astounding fashion.

Bits of this paragraph are sort of true (the wage stagnation part, for example) but most of it is nonsense - at least in an article about robots. What is interesting to explore however is this question about capital ownership versus labour. Put simply, this is where we want things to go - we want more people, in some way, to own more of those value-producing robots rather than get the means for consumption either via wages for labour or a benefits system. If those proper blokes wanting proper jobs did so in the context of having a rent income from a share of those robots this might reduce stresses associated with finding enough money to put food on the table, clothes on the kids and roof over the family.

Of course, one of the things with that food, clothing and roof is it will - so long as government keeps its neb out - be a whole lot cheaper than it is now. As an aside this is one of the reasons why the argument about wage stagnation is a bit one-eyed. What costs us £100 to lay on now may, in our automated future, cost only £20 - so even if wages stagnate, we'll all be a whole lot richer for the automation. The problem is that the route to realising those changes lies in removing the most expensive part of the service economy - people. The brake on automation isn't technological but economic - we only keep investing so long as there's a return and if automation destroys the mass market there won't be any automation.

The answer might lie in some sort of redistributive system such as 'universal basic income' but, depending on how it's set, this can only result in a class of de facto drones. A bigger problem is that such an approach doesn't connect income to ownership but rather links it to taxation. In a democracy this risks people voting to take more and more of other people's money. It would be far better to give workers ownership rather than just cash - in trite terms to give everyone a robot rather than a cheque from the government.

Perhaps the answer comes from a hybrid of these two thing. Until recently the UK's private pension system was held up as a fine example of how these things should work and it invested in industry meaning that nearly all British workers had, in one way or another, a stake in the nation. I appreciate that this might be something of a starry-eyed view of the past but it provides a hint of a possible way through the robot problem. After all those robots are capital and that capital has to come from somewhere - why not a fund or funds created by government expressly for the purpose of such investments, for buying robots. With the beneficiaries of the funds' earnings being the UK public and those payments distributed on a 'universal income' basis? Of course, as a good voluntarist, these funds should have what we might call a 'private socialist' structure such as a mutual or co-op and, as such, would be free from the tendency of governments to waste money on infrastructural vanities.

I've just put this here as a thought - I've no idea whether it would be practical (whose making the robots any how - there's no obvious Sirius Cybernetics Corporation) but it gets out from the pretty sterile 'late capitalism' arguments that dominate discussion of our futures. What I do fear isn't the capacity of our systems, ingenuity and innovation to meet (and make better) our future needs but rather a sort of neo-luddism that leads to the fetishing of inefficiency - we see this with organic and biodynamic farming, for example - and the impoverishment that comes from protectionism.

The future, for all its robots, will continue to require people to provide labour but, just as has happened before, the nature of that labour will change. There's a game played by some of trying to guess what jobs there'll be in the future that we haven't thought of yet - it's not just the 'app economy' or the chance to rent out your spare bedroom to visitors but a whole load of other things too. I suspect that we'll still value human service and that, in its widest form, entertainment will be important. And I'm convinced that some of those things we dismiss as 'micky mouse', especially culture things, will become far more valued as skills than the scientific and technical skills we stress today.

In the meantime we've got to work out how we reassure those proper blokes doing proper jobs at the airport that their life isn't going to be crap once the robots take their jobs away. We need to try and avoid the mistakes of the 1970s and 1980s when we assumed the changing economy would provide for those blokes. It might but, it has more chance of doing so if we start thinking about it before they've been given their P45s.

....

In which a Guardian writer bemoans the lack of slums...

Or so it seems:

In this mix of complexity and incompleteness lies the possibility for those without power to assert “we are here” and “this is also our city”. Or, as the legendary statement by the fighting poor in Latin American cities puts it, “Estamos presentes”: we are present, we are not asking for money, we are just letting you know that this is also our city.

It is in cities to a large extent where the powerless have left their imprint – cultural, economic, social: mostly in their own neighbourhoods, but eventually these can spread to a vaster urban zone as “ethnic” food, music, therapies and more.

All of this cannot happen in a business park, regardless of its density – they are privately controlled spaces where low-wage workers can work, but not “make”. Nor can this happen in the world’s increasingly militarised plantations and mines. It is only in cities where that possibility of gaining complexity in one’s powerlessness can happen – because nothing can fully control such a diversity of people and engagements.

OK, our writer - one Saskia Sassen - doesn't actually use the word 'slum' here because that would load a whole lot of negatives onto her narrative. This narrative is filled with the popular "everything is being bought up by huge corporations" line - as if the buildings in London, New York and Berlin were all owned by collectives, co-ops and interesting old couples who've lived there since the place was built. There's also a slightly worrying 'and lots of the money is Chinese' as if this is necessarily a problem (a decade or so ago the bad foreigners with funny names were Japanese).

Now the point about slums is that they allow people to do those capitalist things away form the gaze of the authorities occupying expensive real estate in the city proper. And our writer is perhaps right to be concerned about the squeezing out of these places:

"Arrival cities are known around the world by many names," Saunders writes: "slums, favelas, bustees, bidonvilles, ashwaiyyat, shantytowns, kampongs, urban villages, gecekondular and barrios of the developing world, but also as the immigrant neighbourhoods, ethnic districts, banlieues difficiles, Plattenbau developments, Chinatowns, Little Indias, Hispanic quarters, urban slums and migrant suburbs of wealthy countries, which are themselves each year absorbing two million people, mainly villagers, from the developing world."

But Sassen is also wrong because the arrival of those grand developers, the imposition of those gigantic regeneration schemes, and the suborning of public space to private use doesn't stop those migrants coming. They still fill up the cracks, occupy what space can be found that's too marginal, contested or contaminated to attract those rich foreigners with funny names and their millions. And Sassen seems overly bothered by the location of public buildings filled with regulators and controllers - as if these people are either the friend of the slum-dweller or their places of work truly public spaces.

In The Arrival City, Doug Saunders talks about Istanbul - not the old city of tourists and old architecture but the far suburbia where the rural migrants settled illegally and built the fastest growing, most dynamic communities of Turkey. And this is the pattern in all our cities - the success of those at the margin makes the success of the city, a success achieved in the teeth of government opposition, eviction, regulation and distrust.

But they stay in the city. I remember selling a magnificent hand-stitched quilt to a middle-aged Jewish lady in Mill Hill. She and her husband were rich, living in a multi-million pound house in a desirable North London suburb. Asking the woman why she wanted the quilt she told me that she 'wanted an heirloom, our families came here with nothing and we want our families to have something'. Those families didn't come to Mill Hill, they came to London's East End and lived in a couple of cramped rooms from where they made their way in the world.

We look at slums and see squalor, dirt and disorganisation. The leaders of these places speak of poverty, exclusion and prejudice. But those new arrivals aren't staying in those slums - the best summation of what drives them is this quotation from Marco Rubio, one of the men seeking the Republican nomination in next year's US Presidential election:

Many nights growing up I would hear my father’s keys at the door as he came home after another 16-hour day. Many mornings, I woke up just as my mother got home from the overnight shift at Kmart. When you’re young and in a hurry, the meaning of moments like this escape you. Now, as my children get older, I understand it better. My dad used to tell us — (SPEAKING IN SPANISH) — ‘in this country, you’ll be able to accomplish all the things we never could’. A few years ago, I noticed a bartender behind the portable bar in the back of the ballroom. I remembered my father, who worked as many years as a banquet bartender. He was grateful for the work he had, but that’s not like he wanted for us. You see, he stood behind the ball all those years so that one day I could stand behind a podium, in the front of a room.

This isn't a defence of slums, just an observation that, for many of those who live in urban poverty, their life is better than the one they left behind. And they also know their children's lives will be better too. I guess only a conservative would really understand this though.

....

Neoliberalism defined...

****

Well sort of....

We live in a neoliberal age now where the Corporations and the Bad people and the Profit do bad things to the Society and the Good People and the Community. Rich people take money from the pockets of poor people because neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is destroying Our NHS with the profits and the privatisation and the One Per Cent. Local shops and artisan bread makers and steel manufacturers are put out of business because neoliberalism and the giant supermarkets and the GM food. George Osborne gives your money to millionaires and billionaires because neoliberalism, and wants to socially cleanse London because neoliberalism and the housing crisis. Heartless Iain Duncan Smith kills disabled people in his spare time because neoliberalism. Save Our NHS from neoliberalism, Saint Bevan [genuflect].

Britain only re-elected this hateful neoliberal Tory government with an increased majority and share of the vote because the neoliberal media confused the minds of the people with their neoliberal propaganda and made them forget just what a star-spangled awesome prime minister Ed Miliband would have been.

Just about sums it all up really.

In truth neoliberalism and capitalism are absolutely wonderful.

....

Capitalism will eliminate poverty if we let it (and ignore Oxfam)

****

The world's plutocrats are gathering in Davos. And, in its annual tradition Oxfam has issued an update of its report on how us evil capitalist bastards are responsible for all that death and starvation in Africa. If only we would tax ourselves more and give the good folk at Oxfam more aid money then things would be fine. The problem is that Oxfam is utterly committed to promoting policies that sustain poverty - its stated aim is to make subsistence farming "sustainable" thereby keeping those peasant farmers just above the point of starvation through the use of aid money.

This article argues that policies used by middle and high-income countries are unsuitable for poorer, agricultural countries; it recommends instead that these nations promote broader access to land and raise land productivity. The authors explain why instruments used by richer countries, such as those that control prices and cheapen food, fail in poorer countries. They describe the features of smallholder farmers in poorer countries, drawing upon evidence from India, Peru, and Guatemala to demonstrate how subsistence farming can be part of policy responses to the distress of a food crisis in both the short and medium term. They call upon donors to improve their understanding of and support for small-scale, subsistence-oriented farming.

What Oxfam are saying here is that it's different in these poor countries and that the thing that made us western folk rich - capitalism - isn't going to work. Indeed, it is utterly shocking that Oxfam support policies that lead to more expensive food, less efficient agriculture and the maintaining of abject poverty in poor countries. So when you reach into your pocket for some change to put in that Oxfam tin or sponsor some well-meaning niece in her swimming or running, think for a second where that money is going. I'm not talking about administration costs here or even the buying of top end 4x4s for aid workers but the policies - policies that sustain poverty in Africa - that Oxfam supports.

The truth is that, not only is Oxfam wrong, but their support for protectionist policies at Davos actively advances the very agenda of those plutocrats and prevents Africa from challenging the dominance of the west. Instead of wibble about taxation or the liberal use of the word 'neoliberalism' what Oxfam needs to demand is an end to agricultural protection in the developed world, a more open banking system and the wider promotion of property rights, free markets and free trade.

Over the past three decades that neoliberalism - the thing Oxfam wants to blame for the ills of the world - has resulted in a billion people escaping abject poverty. Better still, for many of that billion the escape from poverty has been an escape from the tyranny of dirt-scrabble farming. They've moved to the city from where they can play a small part in creating exciting, free and innovative societies - just as happened in the west. Oxfam and its fellow travellers stand - using our cash - between people and the realisation of this dream.

I wrote this a while back - it is still true:

Sit back, put a smile on you face - punch the air with joy. You and me - capitalists both - have sat getting a little richer for thirteen years while a billion folk have escaped absolute poverty. All the international trade, all those businesses and those business folk filling the posh seats in aeroplanes flitting across the world - they've done that, they've lifted those people out of poverty.

Tell Oxfam to either get out of the way or get with the neoliberalism that is ending poverty more quickly that at any time in human history.


....

Thank God for neoliberalism!

Capitalism is wonderful - all that enterprise, that self-interest, that freedom to trade makes us all richer. We need more of it everywhere if we want to eliminate poverty.

....

So Nell, you hate Christmas do you? Bah, humbug!

Every year, somewhere in the torrent of Christmas-related guffle that the media pour into our consciousness, there is the Grinch piece, the 'I'm going to tell you how much I hate Christmas' article. Such articles are as much part of our preparation for Christmas as the 'we've lost sight of the true meaning' rants and the avalanche of charity appeals each more tragic than the next.

We need people who write stuff like this:

Christmas is the stick with which millions of us beat ourselves into brandy-soaked agony for being poor, single, childless, lonely, or simply bad at being jolly. It’s one thing to be single, skint and surrounded by dysfunctional relatives, but it’s quite another when the entire capitalist world is telling you that this is the most magical time of the year. We seem to have lost the script to a pantomime we never even believed in. We have ruined Christmas, without even trying.

Indeed this article (being as it's in the Guardian and all that) fills a specific sub-sector of the 'I hate Christmas' genre - the 'I hate Christmas because of all the advertising, commercialism and evil capitalist exploitation' piece. You see folks, we really don't have any choice in the matter as the glamour of capitalism's seasonal fairies has enchanted us - we are led astray by the glitter of fairy dust. Now is not the time to deal with the ignorance of this view - suffice it to say that it's nonsense.

However, it's necessary for us to have these sorts of writings just so people like me can tell the authors (in this case one Nell Frizzell) to stop being pathetic, grumpy old kill-joys and get down with the spirit of the time. To remind them of this:

"I do," said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough.” 

For this is the message of the Nell Frizzells of our world - like Ebeneezer Scrooge they see Christmas as 'just a day':

...if we really do want to spread comfort and joy this year, we should accept it for what it is; a day. Just a day. Whatever Roy Wood says.

You see our Nell sees Christmas as an intrusion into her misery and her celebration of the misery of others. The sad thing is that (and I've no issue with Nell sitting in the corner with her pet lip, arms crossed and definitely not getting involved in anything that seems even the slightest bit like festivity) what the 'I hate Christmas' brigade don't appreciate is that, if we didn't have Christmas, we'd have to invent it or something pretty much like it. And the very reason for that is that very gloom, misery and despondency that surrounds so many of us - especially in the dank, dreary darkness of winter. The thing Nell evokes in her sorry tale of Christmas past and Christmas present.

More to the point (and it's a very important point) Christmas is still the very antithesis of that supposed selfish capitalism. Even ignoring the God bit, Christmas is a time when we give presents, send blessings and share stuff with our neighbours. Most of the year we don't sing songs with other people (I'll be carolling at The George in Cullingworth tomorrow - beer and song, what could be better), we don't make a specific effort to consider our fellow men near and far, and we don't make an effort to recognise the bonds of family and friendship that hold our society together.

It is people like Nell Frizzell who are the selfish ones (and let me stress that I'm not saying they can't be selfish, just that their selfishness is sad and pathetic) with their self-righteous, posing rejection of Christmas. Po-faced and preachy, Nell refuses to play - no gifts for friends, no smile, no games. Just nonsense about capitalism.  Nell doesn't even plan to replace expensive largess with making a cheaper, personal effort to join in the spirit of sharing - nope, Nell plans to do nothing, to sit there pretending she's a better person because she's opted out of Christmas. Well she's wrong and there's only one thing to say to such people...

Bah, Humbug!

....

Values? The one that really matters is freedom...

Queueing for bread - socialist values in action

This is a pretty typical framing of a left wing values statement - from Julian Dobson:

And that brings us back to values. Do we want a society that turns competitiveness into a totem, blames individuals for social problems and judges success on earnings and rates of return? Or are we looking for something more inclusive and creative, places that recognise the value generated by people’s imagination and relationships and passion for the common good? 

And the typical slightly green, middle-class leftie will feel a little shudder of affirmation through the bones at this statement. Absolutely, our lefty might say, this statement clearly separates the uncaring, individualist from the caring, sharing collectivist. They might add little mutterings about 'trickle down' or 'profits' before smiling again as the high plateau of collaborative, cooperative glory comes into view.

The problem with all this is that it is a delusion, a deliberate self-deception. All this enthusiasts for ending the dark and evil neo-liberal world and ignorant of its central truth - that far more than the state-directed, protectionist systems our caring lefties aspire to create, free market systems are absolutely about inclusion, creativity, passion value generation, imagination and mutual benefit. The secret lies in that magic word 'free' and it is all that freedom that gave us the wealth to ponder such matters as 'values'.

Once the matter of values was something for priests and philosophers. Most ordinary people - and this still stands for a great deal of today's world - were way too busy keeping body and soul together to bother about what it all meant. Then something happened. It wasn't a planned economy, it was a spark of liberty that set us free. And we became free because the trap of subsistence was removed, we could lift our head up from the daily drudge and think about those values, about what we thought the world should be like.

And the match that ignited those flames of freedom wasn't a law, it was capitalism, the liberal enlightenment that opened up trade and allowed business to innovate, to create and to transform - in just a few decades - the entire world.When the likes of Julian Dobson paint free markets in negative terms, when they demonise the idea of choice by talking about competition as a negative, and when they dismiss individual material success as somehow distasteful or exploitative, what these people do is build a mighty man of straw, a grand lie.

This lie is essential to socialism - without that mighty straw man representing capitalism's sins the logic of the left collapses into the terrible reality of a place where people queue for seven hours to buy some flour and some milk. This, rather than sunlit uplands, is the consequence of that focus on the "common good" - for there is no common good other than that determined by the interactions, transactions and exchanges of the people. And the best way to get those mutual benefits isn't through committees, co-operatives and regulations but through free exchanges in a free market. That is why the left must make a demon of liberty because they can't admit that free choice, free exchange and free speech is the best road to a good society, to a place where those values they prattle on about are met for everyone.

....

Finding a New England

Take of English earth as much
As either hand may rightly clutch.
In the taking of it breathe
Prayer for all who lie beneath.
Not the great nor well-bespoke,
But the mere uncounted folk
Of whose life and death is none
Report or lamentation.
Lay that earth upon thy heart,
And thy sickness shall depart!

A couple of days ago, I made the case that the only sustainable solution to the 'West Lothian Question' is an English Parliament based in Bradford. However, there are several challenges to this being achieved, not least the Left's continuing fear - even hatred - of the idea of England. It is this that lies underneath Labour's opposition to any resolution of what we should really call the 'English Question' far more than naked political calculation or the national ambitions of Scottish MPs on Labour's front bench.

Don't get me wrong here, all those Labour MPs will cheer on English national sports teams - especially when this is needed for the purposes of getting votes. But those same MPs are from a generation brought up to believe the myth of a white supremacist, flag of St George waving idea of English identity. A myth that was - for all that racists and fascists still try to claim it a truth - blown to smithereens, for me and millions of other Englishmen, by the sight of Ian Wright's celebration of England scoring. We'd been told that the idea of England was racist, something not for black or brown people, and suddenly that wasn't so.

Yet the left still hates England, is still ready to see the red cross on a white background as a symbol of something to be hidden away, something shocking. The left point to the lunatic fringes of the racist right, to the EDL, and say 'that is England'. But it isn't and it never has been, England was never about the hooligan or marches or flags as symbols of race. Indeed the English were never a race - I remember my dad talking about a school friend with a name like Seamus O'Toole who would gleefully thump anyone who tried to tell him he wasn't English.

Today, as the flag and the idea of England is reclaimed by decent folk, the left has discovered a new problem. England is capitalist, we genuinely are that thing Napoleon thought was an insult but isn't - a nation of shopkeepers. More than that, we have taken that idea of self-reliance, independence, trade and the mutual benefit from exchange and made ourselves rich. Indeed the criticism of England is almost a cry of envy - how dare you make yourself rich by providing consumers with the things they want. And I know that we're not the only capitalists - everywhere is in the game of creating wealth, after all - but we are a nation that thinks capitalism is a damn fine idea, something to celebrate.

But to make this work we need a new England. Not a changed England but a rediscovery of some bits of that idea of capitalism we lost sight of along the way. We need reminding that capitalism isn't about the fix, is not a thing of exploitation, isn't some plaything for masters of the universe. We need to realise that capitalism is about trade and exchange, it works because I get more value from that thing you have than you do - and I will pay for that added value. So capitalism isn't about banks, it's not about macroeconomic and it's not about international oil companies. It's about hand carved shepherd's crooks, it's about craft ale, it's about barbers, bookmakers and the boozer. A million and one things that make our lives happier, healthier and more fun.

The left simply doesn't understand this and fears that a new England would reject its controlling, dictatorial and depressing philosophies. So bogeymen are invented to try and destroy English identity - stuff about racism or the rise of UKIP - in the hope that we don't create that new England. This is why rather than an English Parliament, Labour and the Liberal Democrats will try to push for regional government or a confused devolution of some powers to some local councils (but not to all of them).

At the head of this piece is a quotation from Kipling's 'Charm' - reading it brings lump to my throat because it's not about government but about England. Just as all those other things we cherish in England - church bells, the pub, afternoon tea, football on a Saturday afternoon - have little to do with government. Yet all those things are affected - and some are threatened - by government, by the left's petty little programmes of control, by their unchanging belief that they know better than you do.

To win the argument, England needs more than 'fairness', we need to form an ideological basis for home rule just as Scottish Nationalists created the idea of Scotland as a 'progressive' nation, we need to make the case for England as a conservative nation, as a place where those values of community, self-reliance, decency and looking out for the neighbours are held to our hearts. Not as justifications for government but as the values that all of us try to live our lives by. I could sell that in Cullingworth.

....

Food poverty is a failure of government. Capitalism is the solution.

****

I'm a capitalist. A proud capitalist. I believe that, without capitalism, we'd be poorer, less healthy, shorter lived and less happy. The evidence of the past two hundred years tells me this is so.

The thing about capitalism, about those free markets, that neoliberalism is that it celebrates everything that is good about people. I know you've been told by your teachers and by the man on the telly that capitalism is all about greed and rapacious exploitation. But they are wrong - capitalism is about exchange, cooperation, creativity and, above all, foregoing something now in the anticipation of more tomorrow.

I am always curious when people seek affirmation of their mistaken belief about capitalism in what they term 'market failure'. By this, they don't mean that the market actually stopped working (markets just don't do this) but that the market didn't deliver the outcome they desire. So it is with food banks. We are told that these little local institutions are a consequence of capitalism's failure because it has failed to put food on the table of some families.

Except this isn't the case at all is it. Food banks are a consequence of the failure of government not the failure of capitalism or the market. Look at those figures from the Trussell Trust - over half of those arriving for support are doing so because the benefits system has failed them in some way. So the market (a generous, charitable market in this case) steps in to provide - for we should be clear about charity, it is a private matter driven by the energy of people who want to help not by the direction of the state.

The second important lesson in this is that people's generosity is made more effective by the success of capitalism. All those people can afford to forgo something in order to help others have dinner - if we'd not had that neoliberalism we would still help but the help would not be enough. Children really would go without rather than getting food.

We have still got poverty - and be clear that poverty is absolute material lack not some abstract measure of inequality. But we are able to respond to that poverty both by urging the government to act and also by doing something ourselves. Even if that something is as little as giving some tins of beans and a bag of pasta to the food bank. However, if we want to eliminate that poverty - not just through relief but forever - we need to support capitalism because that is the best, we could say the only effective, route from poverty to comfort.

In an inverted way the wealthy and powerful can afford to reject capitalism - they're already on top of the pile. For the poor, the market and its freedoms should represent the route out from not knowing where tomorrow's dinner will come from. Sadly, some of those wealthy and powerful protect their wealth and power by telling the poor their state is due to freedom and the market rather than the reverse. Yet every exchange in that free market adds value whether it's a gift freely given, a bartered exchange or a cash transaction. Those who try to stop this liberty are the true creators of poverty, people who have the good things using their power to prevent others using capitalism to getthose good thing.

....

Oxfam are wrong (again)

****

Oxfam are wrong.

OK this isn't a surprise since we're talking about a large, wealthy, powerful organisation that dedicates itself to keeping poor people poor (although they don't quite put it that way).

Oxfam are wrong:

Working For the Few, published ahead of this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, details the pernicious impact that widening inequality is having in both developed and developing countries, helping the richest undermine democratic processes and drive policies that promote their interests at the expense of everyone else. 

It all sounds good and caring. It reads like the good folk at Oxfam really do have the interests of "the world's poorest" at heart. The problem is that it's not inequality that's the problem, at least not in getting "the world's poorest" out of abject poverty.

I know this. And it's why Oxfam are wrong:

 

There you go Oxfam. While all those rich folk have been piling up the cash, billions of people who used to be really, really poor stopped being really really poor. OK, they're not as rich as us yet but far fewer of them - freed from the death sentence that is subsistence farming - are starving to death because they are too poor.

I know it's hard to admit. I know that Oxfam's world view doesn't allow for the idea that it's capitalism and free markets that get people out of poverty.

But it's true. We know it's true. Forty years of that awful 'neoliberalism' stuff shows us that it's true.

So, as I wrote last year when Oxfam published their "get into the papers ahead of Davos" report:

Sit back, put a smile on you face - punch the air with joy. You and me - capitalists both - have sat getting a little richer for thirteen years while a billion folk have escaped absolute poverty. All the international trade, all those businesses and those business folk filling the posh seats in aeroplanes flitting across the world - they've done that, they've lifted those people out of poverty.

....