Laissez-Bloody-Faire...

I often wonder what the Right's much touted low taxation, low regulation society might actually look like. From the perspective of an ordinary Joe Soap living on the state pension, all I can see emanating from this future Nirvana is more of what we have at the moment: low pay, poor living conditions, no safety net for the 'sins' of being chronically ill or unemployed or old. The logical endgame of laissez-faire economic policy is where we've been getting to for the last forty years. It wouldn't even be so bad if the capitalists had accrued their wealth honestly in their so-called 'free market'.

The myth of the markets is that soft regulation and keeping taxes low incentivises entrepreneurship and encourages business 'freedom'. If this ethos applied to all strata of business activity, this would undoubtedly be the New Jerusalem of enterprise. But it doesn't and seldom has; least of all now. The sheer unassailable facts of the matter are that scale talks. Money talks. Insider influence talks. It's simply not a level playing field, as Thatcher "The Grocer's Daughter" well knew when her government fed the populace of the UK the myth of the markets with the promise of wealth for all. Even then she had to sell off most of the country's family silver in order to fund the free-for-all that ensued, and continues today.

The only way you can run a successful, happy and law-abiding society is by making damn' sure no-one goes hungry, wants for comfort or suffers medical distress without support. The 'incentive' to go out and start a business is simply not an option for most people: getting a small business (and by extension sowing the seeds of a bigger business) is mostly a matter of luck in finding the necessary funding to stay alive until your first accounts are due. 'Banks are not in the business of funding risk...' is a direct quote from a business meeting we had a very long time ago. Tell that to the victims of Northern Rock et al.

The simple bottom line is that as a society, we need to look after the majority who will never become 'business-people' or ever hold down a 'high-flyers' occupation. Everyone has a rôle to play and in truth, the so-called 'blue collar' jobs are the ones that create the wealth of the capitalist system. Without them, there is no 'means of production' and I for one would welcome a return of the original wording of clause four to the Labour Party constitution:

'To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.' [source: Wikipedia]

Blair's watered-down New Labour version reads in part thus:

'The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few, where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe, and where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect.' [ibid.]

This latter is as vacuous as one of Doris Pooh's promises: it's a diluted, hippie, bean-bag-passing excuse for socialism that leaves the field open to the status quo capitalism of inherited wealth and power, backed to the hilt by the unscrupulous resource thieves and ecological despoilers of our planet and the parasitic power & wealth brokers, bankers and sundry other middlemen (they mostly are male) creaming off their slice of the pie, whilst leaving the rest of us impoverished in their polluting wake.