Having just endured the party conference season, though, it’s clear to me that, beyond the headlines, an even more profound debate is gaining momentum, with much greater potential impact on the long-term living standards of millions of workers across the UK and beyond. It’s of relevance to the vast majority of countries on earth, in fact, for it’s a debate about the future of capitalism itself.[...]
A recent YouGov poll suggested around 60% of voters think the railways and Royal Mail should be renationalised. Over half want the water and energy companies back in public sector ownership. A ComRes survey earlier this year showed that young British adults now think capitalism is more dangerous than communism.[...]
The reality for many is that, across the West, stagnant wages and spiralling corporate profits are fuelling a sense that capitalism is now skewed, with the benefits accruing to an elite few at the expense of the many. And that’s allowing Corbyn to present, with some success, his programme of aggressive renationalisation, sweeping trade union powers and highly punitive taxation as “the new common sense of our time”. [...]
But many of the voters the Tories need to attract – young couples struggling to make ends meet, graduate professionals with no chance of buying a house – weren’t alive in 1976. To them, assertions from wealthy ministers that ‘capitalism is the key to prosperity’ sound offensive. Talk that ‘Labour always wrecks the economy’ or that Corbyn ‘placated the IRA’ fall on deaf ears.
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