Douglas Carswell's Blog

Why critics of corporatist capitalism now come from the right

“Why are the failings of capitalism only being exposed by the right?” asks the Observer’s Julian Coman.

Because Julian, the left seems mesmerised by precisely the kind of corporatist interests that landed us in this mess. 

The proudest boast of the British left was that it once stood to take power away from the elites and dispersed it among the people. In the tradition of the Levellers, the Chartists and the Suffragettes, the left stood against the unaccountable concentration of political and economic power.

But what would Keir Hardie think of the movement he helped found?

A century on, he'd find an unaccountable establishment taking money from the taxpayer to socialise bankers’ loses - while privatising their profits. He'd maybe marvel at how the old aristocratic elite had merely been replaced by a new elite of unelected and unaccountable Eurocrats, human rights judges and quango heads.  What might most surprise the man who helped found Labour would be the discovered that far from railing against the corporatist state, the left helped put much of it in place. 

When Guardinistas today attack what they perceive to be the shortcomings of rampant free market capitalism, they miss their mark.  Why?  Because there is precious little free market capitalism to attack. They tilt at a windmill. From regulated energy markets, to telecoms markets, to planning and construction, to aerospace and defence, we have become a corporatist command state.

Coman writes that “Even Douglas Carswell, one of the more right-wing MPs among the new Conservative intake, has joined the fray, arguing that "the free market all too often turns out not to be a free market at all, but a corporatist racket for the few".

If Coman and co looked beyond the facile labels Guardianistas love to apply to those who don’t share their group-think, I doubt he’d have used the word “even”.  If he read The Plan or articles I've written in his own newspaper group, he might see how the left has let the banner of radicalism slip from its grasp. 

Today the left sides with each of those vested interest behind the great public policy failures of our time – out-of-touch police chiefs, inept monetary policy officials, bankers demanding bailouts, the stupid, arrogant EU elite. 

It is those on the right, advocating direct democracy and radical accountability, who provide the more compelling critique of the corporatist command state we are in.

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