The socialist argument is that people are far more likely to do what they want to do, and what they are best able to do, if the reward for everything is roughly the same than if a fortunate minority are beckoned to a specific set of skills by huge rewards. ibid. ch5
Socialism means that the means of production are owned and controlled by society so that what is produced can be shared out according to people’s needs. Socialism is founded on the idea of equality, which means that most people will get the same.
The basic objections to such a system have been the same ever since it was first conceived, and the arguments against them are still very much the same too.
Human nature, it is said, is fundamentally opposed to such a system, since human nature is selfish and greedy. In the end the ‘old Adam’ will out, and will wreck any egalitarian system.
Poor ‘old Adam’ is always hauled out to justify the horrors of capitalism. Two hundred years of exploitation don’t sound so bad if you can put it down to human nature. In fact, however, people’s natures are not at all like those of speculators in the City of London. Indeed it is hard, even in the City of London, to come across people whose natures are dominated entirely by greed, selfishness and a hatred of the rest of the human race. There are at least as many examples in everyday life of generosity and self-sacrifice as there are of selfishness and greed. ibid.
How people behave depends very much on the kind of society they live in. If the society beckons forward the greedy and the selfish, if it offers them great riches and privileges in return for collaboration in exploiting others, if it criminalises solidarity (as the Tory trade union laws have done), then people will lose their confidence in one another, shrink into their shells and denounce their neighbours. If, on the other hand, society welcomes those who act and think as part of the community, people’s confidence in themselves and in one another will grow and the dark side of their natures will diminish. ibid.
Great disparities of wealth in society, however, restrict freedoms every bit as much as restrictions on voting. Everyone is ‘free’ to send their children to private school, to have tea at The Ritz, to gamble on the stock exchange. These ‘freedoms’ are defended far more vigorously than the freedom to vote, yet they are in fact restrictions on freedom. For every one person who can have tea at the The Ritz, there are a hundred who cannot do so because they have not got the money. If 10 per cent can send their children to private school and secure for them a straight route back into the privileged class from which they came, 90 per cent cannot do so – are banned from doing so – because they cannot afford it.
Thus the ‘freedom’ handed out by capitalist society is more often than not the opposite of freedom. Yet the idea of freedom still prevails, because the prevailing ideas of any society are the ideas of the class which runs it.
So the people who fight against these ideas – whether in strikes, demonstrations, popular protests or just in argument – are always, or almost always, swimming against the stream. They are the minority. But this minority, unlike the passive majority, can involve other people far outside their immediate orbit. And once involved in struggle against the old society, people’s ideas can change decisively. ibid. ch6
The rise and fall of the ‘business cycle’, capitalism’s ‘booms and slumps’, do not wait to see which government is in office. They follow economic laws over which parliamentary laws have nothing but the remotest control. Governments can shell out money for the unemployed, but only enough to keep them worse off than the very lowest-paid of the employed. They can employ a few, train a few. But no government can alter the rules of a catastrophic economic system.
... The market and the struggle between classes which it creates lay down the priorities for society. If there is full employment, and the trade unions are strong, they fight for decent housing and welfare. This is just as likely to happen under a Tory government as under Labour. Houses, hospitals and schools then get built for the masses, because the employers and the moneylenders can afford them. But when capitalism is in crisis, the battle for every penny intensifies. Unemployment weakens the unions, and it is the employers who feel strong, militant and confident. ibid.
Only the working masses can change society; but they will not do that spontaneously, on their own. They can rock capitalism back onto its heels but they will only knock it out if they have the organisation, the socialist party, which can show the way to a new, socialist order of society. Such a party does not just emerge. It can only be built out of the day-to-day struggles of working people. Paul Foot, Why You Should Be a Socialist
When someone comes to write a history of the Great Thatcher Decade (the 1980s), one of their basic texts should be a little book by a former City Editor of the Times, William Kay. Mr Kay called his book Tycoons, and based it on thirteen interviews with men who made millions in the early 1980s.
One of the self-made men was Gerald Ronson, whose Heron Corporation was unheard of when he launched his first ‘brilliant, daring’ takeover bid in 1981. Ronson told Kay that Heron was a ‘very conservative business’. He said he didn’t take risks, he just bet on certainties. What’s more, he kept strictly within the law. ‘There are plenty of crooks in the petrol business,’ he told Kay, ‘but they don’t come to work for us.’
This was surprising because perhaps the biggest crook of them all was Gerald Ronson. He made his fortune not so much by ‘daring’ bids but by gambling on the stock exchange. His greatest gamble was in 1986 when his friend, the super-swindler Sir Jack Lyons, asked him to buy some shares in Guinness to boost the share price in the firm’s takeover of Distillers. Ronson obliged with a cool £25 million. He lost not a penny on this investment of course, but as a reward for stumping up so much at an awkward time Guinness slipped him a personal donation of £7 million.
Ronson and Lyons were only caught when the biggest swindler of them all, the American stock exchange gangster Boesky, grassed on them to save his skin. The crooked transactions by which Ronson and Lyons rigged the institutions they loved could not possibly have been exposed by ordinary journalists since there was no public record of them whatsoever.
Ronson and Lyons were not ‘rotten apples’ in the capitalist barrel, as has been pretended. On the contrary they were both very close to the grandest apple of them all, the prime minister. Lyons was a personal friend, and Thatcher’s two closest advisers, Tim Bell and Gordon Reece, both in their own right entrepreneurs of the kind she admires, were paid advisers to Guinness at the time.
The ruthlessness with which Thatcher and her cronies pursued the values of free enterprise did not extend to obeying the rules laid down by that free enterprise. Indeed, in a way, one of the central tenets of that free enterprise was that its devotees should feel free to make up their own rules. Paul Foot, article All Fall Down November 1990
The stories of Ronson, Gunn and Ashcroft have been repeated over and over again in the last twelve months. Celebrated Thatcherite entrepreneurs like Sophie Mirman of Sock Shop, George Davies of Next, Azil Nadir of Polly Peck, have all come crashing down. Harris Queensway, the brainchild of another Thatcher knight, the carpet king Sir Phil Harris, is now bust (though Harris himself sold out well before the disaster, for a little matter of £60 million).
Even the two top spokesmen for the Thatcher miracle – Murdoch and Maxwell – are in desperate trouble. Scandal after scandal has rocked the City: Barlow Clowes, Dunsdale, Ferranti. What does it all mean? ibid.
These obituaries were written in the sort of reverential tone which might have been reserved, say, for the prodigal son. The general theme was that here was a man who had strayed and should be pitied by all decent upper class people.
The real reason for the sympathy was, however, not that Poulson was a crook but that he was caught. Tories are always singing the praises of self-made men and John Poulson was certainly that. His background was the very essence of stout hearted English self-help.
... He was a Tory, but he noticed that Tories often charged more (and expected higher bribes) than Labour politicians, so he built his practice on the bribery of Labour councils in the north of England and Scotland.
Of course if a greedy Tory came his way Poulson snapped him up. He welcomed with open wallet a Tory cabinet minister, Reginald Maudling, and a prominent Tory backbencher, John Cordle, whose membership of the Synod of the Church of England in no way precluded him from accepting generous bribes from John Poulson.
Poulson built one of the biggest architectural practices in Europe by the simple device of bribing politicians, council officials, sheikhs and sultans.
No Labour chairman of committees was too lowly for Poulson. Vast inedible dinners in hotels were his speciality for Labour councillors.
There was no reason at all why John Poulson should ever have been knocked off his pedestal. The business world then (and now) was full of gangsters and charlatans who lived out their life in the full glow of their contemporaries’ high regard.
Poulson was done down by his own greed. Like Robert Maxwell in a later period, he became obsessed with obtaining riches which were beyond his grasp. He borrowed too much and spent too much.
When he finally went bankrupt, journalists who had honoured him and fed at his table turned on him to gloat at the ‘greatest corruption story of the decade’.
Poulson went to prison for seven years. Yet he did nothing more than what other more skilful 'entrepreneurs' have done.
In many ways he was a model for the ‘enlightened self-interest capitalism’ which became known as Thatcherism. He helped himself at others' expense, grabbed what he could from his workers, sold his customers short with shoddy goods, built himself a palatial house and promised to do his duty to God and the Queen. Paul Foot, article 13th February 1993, ‘Bribery & Corruption’
Since he was elected Tory MP for Tatton in 1983, he [Neil Hamilton] has rested the extreme Thatcherite right, constantly baiting true unionists, the unemployed and the dispossessed. He flaunts the sterile wit and pervasive arrogance of all the Thatcherite Young Turks who grew rich and famous at the expense of others in the Golden Years of Private Enterprise. Hamilton denies being paid £2,000 a time to ask questions, but he does not deny a sumptuous weekend in Paris at the expense of the ghastly old liar and cheat Fayed, the chairman of Harrods. Dinner each night for the MP and his wife cost the Harrods boss £232. How that figure must have delighted ‘scroungers’ in bed: breakfast accommodation so often mocked by Hamilton and his ilk.