In this Saturday Long Read, Will Snell, CEO of the Fairness Foundation, explores how extreme wealth reshapes political power - and what that means for democratic trust.
I am so sick of news organisations such as the BBC providing a platform for right wing "think tanks" and acting as if they provide neutral commentary when they are in fact funded by the rich whose interests they represent.
One would be rather daft to try to disagree with anything written as the consequential evidence is literally all around us.
However. What puzzles, and saddens me particularly, is that we have violent agreement on both the nature and scale of the 'problem' the world's 99.99% face, but bugger all suggestions/plans to ameliorate its impacts!
We agree, it's a minute percentage of the population pulling the strings, so how is it, considering the physicality and/or brain power of the rest of us, we continue to sit frozen to our increasing piles of shite utterly impotent?
Our near cousins, the French, would be ransacking the joint, stringing up those they deem guilty or greasing the guillotines ready for a wonderfully satisfying weeks work. WTF do we Brits do? The sum total of sweet fook all except bend over even further so we can be screwed ever deeper.
Are we really so utterly pathetic now? What the hell happened to the Dunkirk Spirit? The poor bastards who literally, selflessly, gave their lives in their thousands in order to give us a future are genuinely making more noise than we are as they turn in their graves at our sheer cowardice.
We literally know the names of those responsible. We literally know what is required to redress the balance. This is no unknown enemy, so why the hell are we not DOING something instead of whining? IMHO Great Britain is now THE single most pathetic nation on Earth. I'm so very glad I'm old, but so very sad at the prospects for those of you not...
No disagreement here. We have, by sacrifice and luck built ourselves a bit of a bunker, but at the cost of social and economic inclusion. Any that over forty years. Much good it will do us as the catastrophe unfolds. Individualism, however idealistic, won’t cut it. I share your despair (daily rants) at the seeming lack of any collective political rebellion in the UK against these parasitic moronic families in charge.
Do not be gaslit into believing the present, politically constructed over half a century, neoliberal’s economic machine designed to enable their personal privateer perpetual profiteering is unique to the UK. This is an unfolding global social catastrophe.
One event that would definitely crack open their criminal #Epstein Class anti social solidarity is a global property and land price crash. Not that this would not be awful for many innocents but without some financial Black Swan event that serves to break their complex network of postwar privateer Ponzi schemes, like their hedgefund and bond market adjacent global property markets, I agree that nothing will stop them. What they just chose to do to non #Epstein Class aligned civilians in Gaza is a clear warning of how they will punish the majority in GB, after they have debt raped us into insoluble poverty and enslaved us all to offshore hedgefund rentier portfolios and global big banks.
Please don't think me rude, but is that it? PLant a bomb and sit alongside the arseholes as it goes bang!!! Sorry, my frustration get the better of me...
Thanks for replying, and sorry for banging on, but at the end of the day:
- we know we are in a hole
- we know it's deep & going to get deeper
- we know we're nowhere near the end game
- we know it's worldwide
- we know we are in for yet more shite
BUT
- we know WHAT the problem is
- we know WHO the problem is perpetuated by
- we know HOW we are manipulated
- we know WHY we are screwed
- we known WHEN we are screwed
The ONLY question that EVERYONE should be considering here is, "How the fook do we extracate ourselves?" Nothing, literally nothing, else matters.
If there was a single, easy answer to those questions I'm sure someone a lot more clever than me would be able tell you. The way I see it, if wealth cannot be shared equally then money itself, and therefore the accumulation of it, should become worthless and pointless. Could that ever happen? Probably not. Imagine if a grain of sand could buy you a loaf - a trolley load of groceries - a car or even a house. We'd all be in clover, so to speak, but eventually years down the line you'd get people hoovering up all the sand on every beach so they could buy whatever they wanted leaving rest of us to fight over the scraps - just like it is now. Greed and selfishness are innate with some people, whether their thing is gold or grains of sand. The safeguards against them have to be put in place before the rot we see today can set in. The financial systems in the world are almost like living entities in themselves, feeding greedily off the backs of people who are actually doing all the work. A worldwide general strike could break the system, but that would only be a temporary break at best because people need to work to earn the money to live and so the greedy gold/sand beast would soon recover. Like I said, I don't know what the answers to your questions are. I wish I did.
What you describe Chris is classic Capitalism Mk1 where the sole metric is how large your piles of cash are compared to fellow paracites.
Many years ago I wrote Mk2. Its sole metric is Empathy. Before anyone guffaws themselves to death, there is no reason why it would not work. For the successful it actually means even bigger piles of cash but it's accumulated in association with people rather than solely at their expense. The main point of using Empathy is demonstrating that business doesn't 'have' to operate in an evil, manipulative, exploitative manner to make piles of cash.
To me, only the weak & entitled yet monied behave in this way in order to gain themselves the merest of recognitions. Remind you of any ginger tossers currently sitting somewhere?
A great article. As Yorkshire Dave noted, in France they started sharpening the guillotine to deal with their social inequality problem. The thing with the French Revolution is there are many things that led up to it and caused the perfect storm - not least of which was starvation due to famine. We have a voice they didn't have, but it doesn't seem to get much amplification when we are faced with candidates representing parties that have become pretty much political clones of each other; something we found out to our cost at the last election. They make all the right noises on the election trail but once in office they settle into 5 years of decision making which invariably favours their wealthy donors and lobby groups. I'm not sure if we in the UK are quite uncomfortable enough yet to be getting the pitchforks out. That day may be coming, but unfortunately I don't think it will be very soon.
Excellent summary of the inexorable descent from economic inequality to plutocracy, ending with democratic atrophy. Absolutely right that we need policy mechanisms to "interrupt the cycle".
The niggling question is whether they are sufficient. Marxists would say 'yes'? - everything will fall into place, given the right conditions. Whereas psychologists still worry about the authoritarian lust for power driving elites to seek out loopholes and recoup control via other routes.
Misogyny is a huge factor in the process Will Snell describes (from Epstein and Trump right across the political spectrum to Starmer's 'Boys Club' government, so receptive to lobbyists. It's an endlessly repeated historical force that needs to be tackled both by economic policy change and, independently, head on. (Just my view.)
I remember that when I was young the fact someone was rich was seem as meriting respect. They were successful. They understood the rules. They made systems work for them. And so many poor people, wanting to be 'winners' like them, gave them their loyalty and their vote hoping the magic would rub off on them. Or at least they could shelter under the umbrella. Now there's very few umbrellas and sod all chance of the largesse being shared. But the field keeps tugging lingers. Especially if the wealthy convince the poor that they are all mates together.
I read a very good article recently here on Substack (I can't remember where) by someone who analyses the Mandelson-Epstein connection from the angle of Mandelson's closeted homosexuality and need for validation from the traditional patriarchy. I thought it was funny how Mandelson, who was born at a time when homosexuality was a crime in the UK, decided to side with the oppressors instead of stand up against them. To think this man was appointed not despite his links to Epstein but because of them tells us everything we need to know about the inner workings of high politics.
Compared that with an interview of Mark Carney from a year ago, after Justin Trudeau had resigned as PM.
He was being asked if he would considered putting himself forward for the role as a candidate for the Liberal party and whether other members of the party would consider the same. I can't remember the exact words of his response but it went along the lines that they were all putting country before party or personal interest to give the strongest candidate the chance to win the election and face the challenges ahead. This was shortly after Trump had said Canada could be the 51st state. The interview can be viewed here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs8St-fF0kET
Fast forward to his recent speech at Davos as PM of Canada calling for mid-power nations to join forces to protect democracy and stand up to bullies and you can see the kind of political leader who can help break the cycle of personal profit, greediness and unaccountability that has become the trademark of many of those in charge of shaping democracy.
For me, there a few things at play with Canada that differ to the UK.
First is that there is quite obviously far more 'trust' by Canadian citizens in those who represent them. We have none.
Second, is that Mark Carney has a proper track record in business. He's been there, done it and got a limited edition tailored tee shirt from it. We have no one.
Thirdly, Canadians were literally put under direct threat by the orange clown and, more importantly, recognised its instability so took that threat seriously. We sit back and do nothing.
That's why Canada is where I'm encouraging my daughter to emigrate to.
It's even worse the harder you think! The only people I can think of have long departed - either politics through being utterly disillusioned or this Earth. Woe is , indeed, us.
This is my second attempt to reply as my first somehow vanished. The subject raised by your contributor has been hotly debated in my family for a long time, but still without a definable answer. Raising tax on capital gains is more likely to inflate the cost of housing for individuals as it becomes more expensive to move and thus reduces the mobility of labour and provision of new housing because development is less viable. The problem we cannot agree upon is how to house lower income working families when wages cannot easily cover the cost of renting when workers need to move into areas with higher employment. Since about 1970, UK government has been obsessed by encouraging freehold ownership of houses and followed up with removing rent controls and subsidising loans to those buying to let with their savings. It simply meant buy to let purchasers would always outbid first home buyers. Rent as a proportion of earnings was driven up artificially and local councils no longer built council houses for working families with low income. Housing associations took over that task but let at higher rents. Centuries ago, farms, mining companies, railway companies and industrialists built houses for their own workers but now it is all left to a free market that cannot realistically match the task. Planning controls are necessary but also have the effect of reducing land available for new housing and that drives up land cost elements of construction. It might not have been so bad if the money raised from the sale of the old council houses had been put back into new ones - it wasn't. It has lead to poorer families congregating in cheaper housing areas where work is harder to find nearby and the scare tactics of Tommy Robinson and Farage so easily generate hatred. A Royal Commission to examine all our taxes and allowances is urgently required to place taxation where it works best and to also cap donations to politicians and lobbying operations. Every debate eventually comes back to housing due to the earnings gap and inequitable distribution of corporate income through lack of controls.
I am so sick of news organisations such as the BBC providing a platform for right wing "think tanks" and acting as if they provide neutral commentary when they are in fact funded by the rich whose interests they represent.
One would be rather daft to try to disagree with anything written as the consequential evidence is literally all around us.
However. What puzzles, and saddens me particularly, is that we have violent agreement on both the nature and scale of the 'problem' the world's 99.99% face, but bugger all suggestions/plans to ameliorate its impacts!
We agree, it's a minute percentage of the population pulling the strings, so how is it, considering the physicality and/or brain power of the rest of us, we continue to sit frozen to our increasing piles of shite utterly impotent?
Our near cousins, the French, would be ransacking the joint, stringing up those they deem guilty or greasing the guillotines ready for a wonderfully satisfying weeks work. WTF do we Brits do? The sum total of sweet fook all except bend over even further so we can be screwed ever deeper.
Are we really so utterly pathetic now? What the hell happened to the Dunkirk Spirit? The poor bastards who literally, selflessly, gave their lives in their thousands in order to give us a future are genuinely making more noise than we are as they turn in their graves at our sheer cowardice.
We literally know the names of those responsible. We literally know what is required to redress the balance. This is no unknown enemy, so why the hell are we not DOING something instead of whining? IMHO Great Britain is now THE single most pathetic nation on Earth. I'm so very glad I'm old, but so very sad at the prospects for those of you not...
No disagreement here. We have, by sacrifice and luck built ourselves a bit of a bunker, but at the cost of social and economic inclusion. Any that over forty years. Much good it will do us as the catastrophe unfolds. Individualism, however idealistic, won’t cut it. I share your despair (daily rants) at the seeming lack of any collective political rebellion in the UK against these parasitic moronic families in charge.
Stay awake. Stay angry and all the best.
Do not be gaslit into believing the present, politically constructed over half a century, neoliberal’s economic machine designed to enable their personal privateer perpetual profiteering is unique to the UK. This is an unfolding global social catastrophe.
One event that would definitely crack open their criminal #Epstein Class anti social solidarity is a global property and land price crash. Not that this would not be awful for many innocents but without some financial Black Swan event that serves to break their complex network of postwar privateer Ponzi schemes, like their hedgefund and bond market adjacent global property markets, I agree that nothing will stop them. What they just chose to do to non #Epstein Class aligned civilians in Gaza is a clear warning of how they will punish the majority in GB, after they have debt raped us into insoluble poverty and enslaved us all to offshore hedgefund rentier portfolios and global big banks.
Please don't think me rude, but is that it? PLant a bomb and sit alongside the arseholes as it goes bang!!! Sorry, my frustration get the better of me...
Thanks for replying, and sorry for banging on, but at the end of the day:
- we know we are in a hole
- we know it's deep & going to get deeper
- we know we're nowhere near the end game
- we know it's worldwide
- we know we are in for yet more shite
BUT
- we know WHAT the problem is
- we know WHO the problem is perpetuated by
- we know HOW we are manipulated
- we know WHY we are screwed
- we known WHEN we are screwed
The ONLY question that EVERYONE should be considering here is, "How the fook do we extracate ourselves?" Nothing, literally nothing, else matters.
So, people, what is YOUR answer?
If there was a single, easy answer to those questions I'm sure someone a lot more clever than me would be able tell you. The way I see it, if wealth cannot be shared equally then money itself, and therefore the accumulation of it, should become worthless and pointless. Could that ever happen? Probably not. Imagine if a grain of sand could buy you a loaf - a trolley load of groceries - a car or even a house. We'd all be in clover, so to speak, but eventually years down the line you'd get people hoovering up all the sand on every beach so they could buy whatever they wanted leaving rest of us to fight over the scraps - just like it is now. Greed and selfishness are innate with some people, whether their thing is gold or grains of sand. The safeguards against them have to be put in place before the rot we see today can set in. The financial systems in the world are almost like living entities in themselves, feeding greedily off the backs of people who are actually doing all the work. A worldwide general strike could break the system, but that would only be a temporary break at best because people need to work to earn the money to live and so the greedy gold/sand beast would soon recover. Like I said, I don't know what the answers to your questions are. I wish I did.
What you describe Chris is classic Capitalism Mk1 where the sole metric is how large your piles of cash are compared to fellow paracites.
Many years ago I wrote Mk2. Its sole metric is Empathy. Before anyone guffaws themselves to death, there is no reason why it would not work. For the successful it actually means even bigger piles of cash but it's accumulated in association with people rather than solely at their expense. The main point of using Empathy is demonstrating that business doesn't 'have' to operate in an evil, manipulative, exploitative manner to make piles of cash.
To me, only the weak & entitled yet monied behave in this way in order to gain themselves the merest of recognitions. Remind you of any ginger tossers currently sitting somewhere?
A great article. As Yorkshire Dave noted, in France they started sharpening the guillotine to deal with their social inequality problem. The thing with the French Revolution is there are many things that led up to it and caused the perfect storm - not least of which was starvation due to famine. We have a voice they didn't have, but it doesn't seem to get much amplification when we are faced with candidates representing parties that have become pretty much political clones of each other; something we found out to our cost at the last election. They make all the right noises on the election trail but once in office they settle into 5 years of decision making which invariably favours their wealthy donors and lobby groups. I'm not sure if we in the UK are quite uncomfortable enough yet to be getting the pitchforks out. That day may be coming, but unfortunately I don't think it will be very soon.
Sadly you're right Chris.
Excellent summary of the inexorable descent from economic inequality to plutocracy, ending with democratic atrophy. Absolutely right that we need policy mechanisms to "interrupt the cycle".
The niggling question is whether they are sufficient. Marxists would say 'yes'? - everything will fall into place, given the right conditions. Whereas psychologists still worry about the authoritarian lust for power driving elites to seek out loopholes and recoup control via other routes.
Misogyny is a huge factor in the process Will Snell describes (from Epstein and Trump right across the political spectrum to Starmer's 'Boys Club' government, so receptive to lobbyists. It's an endlessly repeated historical force that needs to be tackled both by economic policy change and, independently, head on. (Just my view.)
I remember that when I was young the fact someone was rich was seem as meriting respect. They were successful. They understood the rules. They made systems work for them. And so many poor people, wanting to be 'winners' like them, gave them their loyalty and their vote hoping the magic would rub off on them. Or at least they could shelter under the umbrella. Now there's very few umbrellas and sod all chance of the largesse being shared. But the field keeps tugging lingers. Especially if the wealthy convince the poor that they are all mates together.
Forelock tugging ffs!
And we suckers keep believing the nonsense being peddled.
If only we could have the leaders we deserve...
I read a very good article recently here on Substack (I can't remember where) by someone who analyses the Mandelson-Epstein connection from the angle of Mandelson's closeted homosexuality and need for validation from the traditional patriarchy. I thought it was funny how Mandelson, who was born at a time when homosexuality was a crime in the UK, decided to side with the oppressors instead of stand up against them. To think this man was appointed not despite his links to Epstein but because of them tells us everything we need to know about the inner workings of high politics.
Compared that with an interview of Mark Carney from a year ago, after Justin Trudeau had resigned as PM.
He was being asked if he would considered putting himself forward for the role as a candidate for the Liberal party and whether other members of the party would consider the same. I can't remember the exact words of his response but it went along the lines that they were all putting country before party or personal interest to give the strongest candidate the chance to win the election and face the challenges ahead. This was shortly after Trump had said Canada could be the 51st state. The interview can be viewed here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zs8St-fF0kET
Fast forward to his recent speech at Davos as PM of Canada calling for mid-power nations to join forces to protect democracy and stand up to bullies and you can see the kind of political leader who can help break the cycle of personal profit, greediness and unaccountability that has become the trademark of many of those in charge of shaping democracy.
For me, there a few things at play with Canada that differ to the UK.
First is that there is quite obviously far more 'trust' by Canadian citizens in those who represent them. We have none.
Second, is that Mark Carney has a proper track record in business. He's been there, done it and got a limited edition tailored tee shirt from it. We have no one.
Thirdly, Canadians were literally put under direct threat by the orange clown and, more importantly, recognised its instability so took that threat seriously. We sit back and do nothing.
That's why Canada is where I'm encouraging my daughter to emigrate to.
Well, exactly. I wonder who would be able to take a similar stand in the UK and it's not very reassuring that no one comes to mind.
It's even worse the harder you think! The only people I can think of have long departed - either politics through being utterly disillusioned or this Earth. Woe is , indeed, us.
Fingers crossed then!
This is my second attempt to reply as my first somehow vanished. The subject raised by your contributor has been hotly debated in my family for a long time, but still without a definable answer. Raising tax on capital gains is more likely to inflate the cost of housing for individuals as it becomes more expensive to move and thus reduces the mobility of labour and provision of new housing because development is less viable. The problem we cannot agree upon is how to house lower income working families when wages cannot easily cover the cost of renting when workers need to move into areas with higher employment. Since about 1970, UK government has been obsessed by encouraging freehold ownership of houses and followed up with removing rent controls and subsidising loans to those buying to let with their savings. It simply meant buy to let purchasers would always outbid first home buyers. Rent as a proportion of earnings was driven up artificially and local councils no longer built council houses for working families with low income. Housing associations took over that task but let at higher rents. Centuries ago, farms, mining companies, railway companies and industrialists built houses for their own workers but now it is all left to a free market that cannot realistically match the task. Planning controls are necessary but also have the effect of reducing land available for new housing and that drives up land cost elements of construction. It might not have been so bad if the money raised from the sale of the old council houses had been put back into new ones - it wasn't. It has lead to poorer families congregating in cheaper housing areas where work is harder to find nearby and the scare tactics of Tommy Robinson and Farage so easily generate hatred. A Royal Commission to examine all our taxes and allowances is urgently required to place taxation where it works best and to also cap donations to politicians and lobbying operations. Every debate eventually comes back to housing due to the earnings gap and inequitable distribution of corporate income through lack of controls.
In the 60s/70s a single wage for a 'working class' person could support a family and buy a modest house.
What was happening then to make that possible that's not happening now?
The clues to finding what can be done to fix the modern mess might be found there?
Very interesting read