Ideas@TheCentre
For richer, for poorer
Recently I attended a lunch in London, hosted by the think tank Civitas, and addressed by former Spectator and The Daily Telegraph editor, Charles Moore. As one of Britain’s leading conservative commentators, Moore picked a surprising topic: Has the left been right all along?
His concern was the left’s persistent claim down the years that those who argue for free markets are really only providing ideological cover for the rich. Against this, the right has always claimed that capitalism truly benefits everyone. Moore was worried that this may no longer be the case.
The politician who, more than any other, tried to make a reality of people’s capitalism was, of course, Margaret Thatcher. When she went to Moscow, and Gorbachev attacked her for only supporting ‘the haves,’ she responded: ‘I’m not trying to defend a class of haves; I’m trying to create a nation of haves.’ She went about it by allowing council tenants to buy their houses, opening up share ownership with a wave of privatisations, and extending private pensions.
But Moore worries that the intended ‘trickle down’ of wealth didn’t really work. In the last 20 years, the rich have grown much richer, but the rest of us have started to struggle. In Britain, private pensions are a disaster, small shareholders have no real power, and large swathes of the north have been denuded of private sector employment. Free trade has released the giant corporations to roam the world, but as Moore noted, local taxpayers get landed with the bills when they ‘come home to die.’ Everything, in short, seems to be run for and by the ‘big people.’
Moore offered no solutions. He simply wanted to alert us to the urgent need to re-energise the reality of ownership for ordinary people. If we cannot do this, he foresees either a growth in popularity for socialist, statist alternatives or the emergence of new fascist leaders offering to address the causes of people’s cynicism and despondency. Current events in Greece suggest he may not be far from the mark.
My own view is that Moore may be exaggerating the division between the rich and the rest. Some of us who are not bankers or multinational chiefs have nevertheless been doing very nicely in the last 20 years. As David Willetts’s book, The Pinch, makes clear, part of the problem that Moore identifies is more generation than class-based. Older people enjoyed free higher education when they were growing up; many have gold-plated, index-linked pensions and have accumulated small fortunes in the housing market. Their children, by contrast, are being saddled with huge university debts, have missed out on defined benefit pensions, and cannot afford to buy a home of their own. It is the younger generation that has been shut out of popular capitalism.
Nevertheless, Moore is right when he identifies a growing popular resentment about banks, big corporations, and rich individuals avoiding tax, receiving hand-outs, and deserting people at home by relocating overseas. He is also right in that the global crisis has ‘changed everything.’ The old certainties don’t seem to work any more, and Margaret Thatcher’s heroic vision of popular capitalism has a hollow ring to many people today. As Moore says, we have to explore new ways of connecting people to the system of private ownership and free markets, otherwise they will quite reasonably conclude that there is little in this system for them.
Moore’s concerns were originally expressed in The Daily Telegraph in July.
Peter Saunders is a Senior Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. He lives in England.
