The UK Labour Party is to the left of the political spectrum but under their current leader Keir Starmer are really just drifting about hoping to benefit from the widespread hatred of the Tory Party.
Under their last leader Jeremy Corbyn the party did genuinely believe in socialism for a while and so did many of its most enthusiastic adherents. Not only that, a lot of its Members of Parliament were also true believers.
Keir Starmer is an extremely clever lawyer but totally lacking in charisma. Somehow or other he managed to convince the socialist die hards under Jeremy Corbyn that he was one of them and they elected him leader when the Labour Party lost the general election in 2019. Subsequently he removed Corbyn from the Labour Party - allegedly because of his anti semitism but in reality because he represented a political threat.
I have a soft spot for Keir - back in 2007 I consulted him on a critical aspect of Human Rights legislation and he did a first class job. Thank you Keir. And judging from the bill of £5,000 for that one hour telephone conference he does actually understand how capitalism works.
Here is Clause 4 of the Labour Party Constitution from 1918 until 1995 when Tony Blair had it removed. Many socialists would like to see Clause 4 re-instated.
Clause 4: "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."
Yes, they have but they didn't actually get round to the mass murder part that is an essential component of socialism and communism
No, it didn't!
Initially, the Labour Party really believed that state owned firms would bankrupt firms run by evil capitalists. So they would start up in competition with the evil capitalists and run them out of business. The reason(s) they thought this would happen were superficially valid:
Unlike the evil capitalists, they did not need to make a "vast profit" to satisfy the greedy shareholders, so they could sell more cheaply
It is obviously far more efficient to have just one firm in the UK for each industry instead of hundreds of firms, each with directors, an accounts department, offices and all of the other stuff that costs so much money
They would not need to waste money on advertising - if you wanted something you just went to the state owned firm that handled that area
So, how did this work out? Well, they very soon found out that nobody wanted to deal with state owned firms as they quickly became notorious for treating customers with contempt. They had no need to be efficient and they weren't. Customers were a nuisance to be actively got rid of where possible.
So, what to do? Well, they did what everybody does when their ideas are proved wrong. They held the faith more strongly. Like a cult whose Messiah has failed to turn up, they re-jigged the plan a bit but the idea that they might be wrong never crossed their minds.
So, if we cannot compete with the evil capitalists, we will take them over by force. And that is what they did. In the UK, vast swathes of the economy were taken into state ownership. Transport, canals, mines, railways, steel and a whole load of other stuff were nationaliised. If you wanted to move something from Manchester to Glasgow you had to do it via the state transport company. To pay a bloke to move it in a van was a criminal offence.
You submitted an application in triplicate and after a few weeks a lorry might turn up to collect your stuff. A few weeks later most of it might well arrive in Glasgow. Or maybe Edinburgh - who cares? There again, it might not. If it didn't, then you could submit a complaint in triplicate and wait a few months for a reply.
If you wanted a phone you had to order one from the Post Office and wait maybe 5 to 10 years. If you wanted an answering phone that would cost you the equivalent of about £100 per week to rent it. Buying one from an evil capitalist for £100 outright and connecting it up was a criminal offence.
Because the state companies had no competitors, they had no need to even pretend to offer good or efficient services. And they didn't. As for the management, the man at the top was invariably a politician who had been deposed and offered the job of running one of the state owned behomeths as a consolation prize. He neither knew nor cared about running a company - his role was to take civil servants and other politicians to lunch and demand yet more money for the firm. Yes, they were all losing a fortune.
Every year there would be vast political embarrassment at the stupendous sums lost by these industries. The steel industry used to lose hundreds of millions of pounds a year back in the 1960s when a hundred million was a lot of money. In todays' terms, the British Steel industry probably lost several billion a year. Where did this several billion come from? Yup. You and me. Sorry about that
That was just steel.
Unfortunately, no. The woke socialists are in full cry! Margaret Thatcher tried her best to kill socialism but every year another crop of bright eyed optimists enters the work force
The Blessed Margaret sold off all the nationalised industries. This is now a blindingly obvious move but at the time even the so called party of capitalism (the Conservative Party) was bitterly divided. The ex Conservative Prime Minister Harold McMillan said that selling off the nationalised industries was like "selling off the family silver"
Die hard socialists would love to see the whole of industry nationalised but most accept the role of private enterprise but wish to try and "improve it" by regulation. They are too dumb to realise that wealth is created by people who set up companies in order to make a profit by offering better or cheaper goods and services and the more you try to regulate and control them the worse it gets. A start up cannot enter a heavily regulated industry because of the sheer overhead of employing dozens of bureaucrats to fill in all those forms and tick all those boxes
So the same old firms carry on and raise their prices because they have no effective competitors. So the left wing demand more regulation and so it goes on
It will just get worse and worse. Anybody with the ability to generate wealth will leave the UK and go somewhere where wealth generation is understood and appreciated.
The pretty girls have already left the UK for the sunshine and the elephant hunters will follow
Bob Cory
Modified on 27/07/2023 at 10:47:50 by ℗ Bob Cory