‘The case for corporate takeovers is that they allow control of poorly run businesses to pass into more efficient hands,’ Richard Lambert, CBI Director-General
THE BUSINESS SECRETARY, VINCE CABLE, has attacked capitalism at his party’s conference in Liverpool. His language was quite extraordinary and Dennis Skinner could not have taken issue with it. For it was the rhetoric of the 1970s when the politics of class warfare took control of the Labour Party and drove it almost to destruction during the following decade.
Mr Cable has it in for what he calls the ‘spivs and gamblers’ in the world of the banking and the financial sector; and also added ‘fat-cat’ company bosses and hostile takeovers to his anti-capitalist rant. Of course, he tells us, he supports business; but it appears that such support is conditional upon vigorous governmental interference in the market place through ever deeper regulation of the business world he is supposed to favour, and is seen on the continent of Europe, where it has driven the talented and ambitious entrepreneur to seek pastures new, where they can use their skills and be rewarded accordingly.
The by now infamous and greedy city of London has been responsible for billions upon billions of pounds paid to the exchequer every year. Indeed, when silly loans were being made and 100 per cent mortgages given, the politician’s ignored the inevitable burst bubble and continued to do so, after all riding upon their popularity, this voodoo economics brought them election victories.
If Vince Cable is to be so vitriolic toward an economic system that has delivered so much, then he should at least include his own profession among the ‘spivs and gamblers’ who allowed to happen what eventually did happen.
Did those ordinary home owners (for instance) who benefited from what went on and are today complaining about, and pillorying the ‘spivs and fat cats’, along with Mr Cable, did they not realise they were part of a modern South Sea Bubble and realise that it could not last?
CAPITALISM WORKS. Every alternative to it has failed. From those who sought a cheap mortgage to those who sold it to them; at every level of the system human nature and profit steers the procedure, and before you knock it think of its achievements in the field of technology, science, and medicine, coupled with its ability to raise the standards of living of all its people. Even the welfare state owes its existence to the private, wealth creating sector, without which the public sector would crumble.
So capitalism can do without Mr Cable’s rant. What happened when the banks collapsed was overseen by politicians who thought they had manufactured the Golden Mean, which they believed would end boom and bust.
Vince Cable’s populist tirade at his party’s conference will make him feel good, but it will mean little else. Indeed, if this Coalition lasts into next year, I can see Nick Clegg ridding himself of this turbulent Bennite. Like all of those before him, attacking the ‘system’ is easy, but Vince Cable has no alternative to it – except to slowly strangulate it through government regulation.
What I think Mr Cable is trying to say but dare not do so, is that we have to follow the social democracy practiced by the rest of Europe. He cannot suggest this outright because of the British people’s animosity toward the project of a United States of Europe that would turn their nation into a mere canton of Europe. So what he has done with his attack upon what he considers unbridled capitalism is to draw us nearer into the European web by suggesting we regulate our free market system in conformity with the rest of Europe.
In other words disband the ‘Anglo-Saxon model’ as the French describe it in favour of the social democratic one that bleaches out what they regard as every unsavoury aspects of capitalism.
VINCE CABLE’S ATTACK is nothing more than the regurgitation of an old paradigm that has failed. Even Sweden, the much worshiped and commonly referred to example of social democracy in practice by the liberal Left, has turned its back on the model it has supported since the Second World War.
Even the Swedes are fed up with social democracy and its multicultural experiment, and so they should be. But as always Europe carries on with the experiment regardless of the signposts pointing to failure.
But the Liberal Democrats share the ambitions of Europe’s bureaucrats and will continue to deliver this nation into the arms of the great unelected and destroy the nation state once and for all.
Cable’s ambitions are not the same as the people’s ambitions for the future of this country. But he will nevertheless chime with the people when it comes to the ‘spivs and fat cats’.
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