A fellow local to me hosts a debating society in local pubs. His debates have in the past been quite mundane but it appears he wishes to move up a notch and has offered a rather more provocative subject for debate - Capitalism.



Just what could a socialist sympathiser such as myself take to this debate?

Tomatoes?

Privatisation?

In the 80's we were told that the aim of privatisation was to primarily reduce public-sector borrowing.

By spreading market incentives privatisation effectively eroded all public sector strength and leftist politics. Opening the public sector enabled profit, for some, and by reducing the power of public sector workers, it suppressed the largest area of worker pressure on wages and working conditions.

This shift from democratic to market led principles favoured those who were strongest in their control of those markets. It just so happened that the majority of those people happened to be represented by the social basis of historic Conservatism.

Since the 2008 crash we have seen a crisis of global capitalism. The private sector is stagnant and trillions of pounds are being retained by corporations who see no viable and safe avenue for profitable investment. One way to attract some of this money out is by giving accumulation of assets by dispossession. During this time of private sector caution our government decided to sell off more publically owned assets at knock down prices. Banks, Royal mail, probation services, large sectors of education and the NHS have gone but there are plans too for roads and more of the police and fire emergency services too.

PRIVATISATION 2

I fail to see any area where the majority of the population of Britain have seen any real and long term benefits from selling off our public services. Yes we have made quite a few people very wealthy but we have also made a lot of people far worse off.

It seems that almost everyone will line up to express how bad life was with nationalisation and how Mrs T, a free market economy and capitalism saved everyone. As would be expected I don't subscribe to that view. I suggest that under nationalisation Britain actually made stuff. Ships and the steel for them, Aircraft & railways too. We made cars and yes some were rubbish but there were innovations in there too. In many technological areas Britain was amongst the world leaders. Government money was spent investing in Britain, either through infrastructure works such as reservoirs, water and sewer supplies, the telecoms network, power stations and the national grid to industries. All these things employed millions of people. Our training infrastructure was amongst the best in the world and most employees were on decent wages and favourable T&C's, including pension schemes.

Today the government spends £billions on benefits propping up businesses who employ people on minimum wages and zero hours contracts. Pension schemes are dwindling year on year and we all have to work longer.

Selling off everything has hardly changed ANYTHING for the UK tax payer. We actually pay more TOTAL tax today, rated against GDP, than we did in the 1970's.

To put this into perspective.

We tax payers now pay more in rail subsidies supporting the private companies (Companies who only run only the trains and manage the tracks) than we did subsidising the whole of British Rail, including engineering manufacture and development!

I further suggest that capitalism stifles innovation.

A capitalist economy will only invest in innovation if is sure it can extract a significant profit / reward. Indeed it is far more likely that a business will favour taking over another business, to obtain their ideas and product licences rather than take the R&D risks.

Recall that the oft-quoted mantra of capitalism is the unseen hand of the market place, bringing prices to their lowest possible values.

This is not the case. The unseen hand brings prices to the highest price the seller can get away with...

I will go along with much of what Barmybob has suggested.

In the late 1970s I joined the leading European manufacturer of computer peripherals.

My particular part of the company made printers and VDUs.

Then I was part of the printer product development team. We did everything from designing the product (which included many patents taken out on the way), designing and procuring all necessary tooling, designing the factory production facilities need to build them, building the product during the introduction period and finally handing over that product to the main production lines whilst working on the next generation.

This was under the aegis of a nationalised holding company.

During the 1980's things began to change, Thatcher came on the scene with her glorification of corporate greed.

The company was sold to one headed up by one of her disciples, Lord King, a venture capitalist.

During the time King's company owned us we stopped building product in Staines and shipped the whole of production up to Cheshire where labour rates were depressed because of low skills and high unemployment. That was about 200 manufacturing jobs gone from the southeast. But hey-ho King's company still got it's million odd pounds a month out of us.

During this time we were still designing new products, both printers and VDUs in Staines, but that was deemed to be to long a time before a payback so the remains of the company got sold to yet another venture capitalist.

Towards the end of August 1988 3 of us were informed that the new printer was no longer to be built up in Cheshire, instead we were tasked with creating a completely new assembly plant complete with all new as yet undefined computerised manufacturing control systems in an underutilised warehouse we owned in Staines. We also had to set up a new distribution and customer service centre at the same time.

Fair enough, an interesting project - that we had to produce the first printers at the end of November the same year only made it more interesting.

Still we progressively recruited small teams in the various disciplines and we did indeed produce the first printers on time up on the mezzanine floor while we were still welding racking for the distribution store underneath.

Once again it came down very much to the ordinary people some of whom had been previously made redundant by the company a few years earlier.

All went well for two years when I was summoned with 2 others to the boardroom in August to be told that all printer production was to be transferred back up to Cheshire starting in 4 months time and we had to increase production to cover the inevitable down time.
All this without being allowed to tell the staff that they would be losing their jobs just before Christmas.

Great, I had to prevaricate and lie to people who had trusted me with their livelihoods. My responsibility was for material procurement and management, production control and distribution. Just a small team of 8 people who had been vital to sales of over a £ million a month.

During the previous year production of VDUs had been sent to South Korea so there were redundancies in the Cheshire factory.

The printer design team had long been broken up as the one printer product was stable, so who needed designers - they cost money.

Anyway the transfer was made and I took on another role within the company which, when I got the chance of early retirement in the mid 90's, had gone from designing and manufacturing all products in the UK to changing the labels on products designed and built in the Far Fast.

Unrestrained capitalism is wonderful. That is if you are not one of the mass of workers it exploits.

Thatcher and others of her ilk should have been hung up as an example why post natal abortion can be a good thing.

BLIMEY...Erm sorry for the rant peeps.

So I now know what happens when you spend a Friday lunch & afternoon in the sunny pub garden sampling their wares!

I was fired up by a local businessman (Plasterer), who seems to spend a good deal of his working day in said pub. He was sounding off at the bar praising UKIP and how this country needs to be hard, on everyone but him.

Was he keen that tax dodging should be clamped down on?

I doubt it

Sadly I know the bloke, and his life story rather too well. We once employed him and he never shut the **** up!

He left school and got his Mr's pregnant when they were both teenagers. They applied and received a council house. They then split up, he moved in with his mum and bought her council house for peanuts. His Mrs lived in her council house on benefits, bringing up his two kids. When his mum passed on he got back together with his Mrs, who he had continued seeing anyway. He then rented out mums house and bought the council house his Mrs lived in.

He is disgusted that his son who works as a labourer, and his pregnant girlfriend, can't be housed by our useless government. They have to live in a scummy rented bedsit but when the baby is born the council will be "Forced" to house them! He constantly bitches about people (Foreigners) getting benefits, houses and taking the country for a ride (oh the irony).

Down the pub he tells everyone that he works six or seven days a week. But he always manages to be in the pub for lunch and be back again just after 4pm. Everyone is also fully aware that he will always take "cash only" work

So yes, listening to this chap, and people like him spout on about UKIP having all the answers does make me sick

He ain't no plasterer Bob. Maybe a chancer with a trowel.
Everybody knows real plasterers are millionaires mate.

But to be serious for a mo,Thatcher will always have two schools of thought about her. As I get older and maybe a bit more thoughtful I now see and relate to the points you make. 30 years ago I would have said you are wrong.

Being an employee of the nanny state, I work in the midlands area interviewing households for the Govt. People always moan to me " I'm not racist, but .." and it always brings a smile to my face. In 15 years of doing this job I have never met an unemployed Pole , quite often offered tea and biscuits in Asian homes [who are always welcoming] [ take note British people, i like a cuppa :), and foreign students are a joy to interview.
I always say its not the foreigners who are a problem in this country, its the bloody sponging English in the council estates who are the pain to visit. " I'm too busy !" Yeah right, watching Jeremy bloody Kyle. Or just having another kid because the first one is coming up to school age and they might have to find a job !
Ok, I aint that keen on half of Africa and the Middle East being over here at the moment, because 6 million extra people in the country since 2001 is doing nothing for the NHS and the housing shortage and lack of school places.
6 million people is 18 Coventrys, put that on a map and see what a vast area that covers !
Rant over.

Leaving aside the "half of Africa and the Middle East" comment, I'm interested to know where your figure of net migration of 6 million since 2001 comes from. I've been looking at the official figures here and I can't see it adding up to much more than half that number.

Apparently he's one of Britain's "Hard Working" people

Aye Bob, I come from a time before electric pocket phones & the tinternet, the pub was a great debating place....

I'm a man who likes simplification when needed. Really doesn't matter what way of life to follow or what choosen governing body is doing their thing in a Country, it's always open to fraud/dirty tricks, illegal money making somewhere along the line. Once a person is put in charge of literally anything, it's just a matter of time when things start going wrong.

This is the population figures, not migration figures, according to census of the UK

Ah, I see! My mistake - I thought that was an unlikely figure for migration.