Socialists, get real: Everything has a price and anyone can be bought

Tesco’s conquest of our high streets has seen the disappearance of independent suppliers. These businesses are further crippled by ever-increasing business rates as local authorities seek to indemnify themselves from the Westminster-imposed public service cuts. Tesco and the other supermarket chains drive down the prices of their suppliers in exchange for their custom. It’s a triple-lock stranglehold that has forced local businesses to fold, leaving the main thoroughfares of towns and villages they once served to become prey to betting shops and fast-food outlets.

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And so you resolve at least to mitigate this by seeking out Fairtrade items on the supermarket shelves and, like the good little socialist you strive to be, you deploy the internet to research the sustainability of your comestibles and the employment practices of the firms which provide them. But it soon comes apart after your fifth packet of Ethiopian coffee because you know you sold out a long time ago.

Your youthful resolve never to participate in the gerrymandered capitalism of home ownership or the postcode lottery of your children’s education evaporated a long time ago. Your student comrades with whom you supported the miners in ’84 and yelled at America to keep its filthy paws off El Salvador gave up the struggle. One by one they succumbed: a Mercedes here; an enrolment at St Aloysius there and the final surrender: membership of a golf club.

And then there are the dinner parties on the Chardonnay estates and those initial encounters with your friendly neighbourhood fascists when you have a choice to make as you hear the words “I’m not racist, but … ” or “If they come here they need to play by our rules”. But you remain quiet.

And as you’ve never worked in the public sector the chances are you’re working for a firm whose shares are held by international hedge funds and nameless investors for whom turning a profit isn’t enough, not nearly enough and never will be enough. And you hope that the extra hours you’ve put in or your membership of the lodge or the local golf club might save you from the tap on the shoulder during the next round of redundancies. And even if you do work in the public sector you’ve become aware of the departmental heads who earn six-figure salaries and then depart after a record of unbroken failure with their pensions intact and a pre-agreed compensation package that’s devoid of anything linked to actual performance.

But you reassure yourself that there is “good” capitalism and that it’s much more benign and compassionate than “bad” corporate capitalism. And you may be right. There are thousands of small firms in Scotland’s commercial landscape where the owners refuse to kick the arse out of it by withdrawing wads of cash from the business. They plough the profits back in and hire local people, perhaps run a sustainable apprenticeship scheme and pay a decent wage. They give capitalism a good name because they are motivated by ideas of fairness and rewarding hard work.

The problem though, is that “bad” capitalism swamps these struggling outposts of decency and fairness. Hundreds of small UK businesses folded as RBS preyed on them by cancelling overdrafts and loans and then killing them as they struggled to meet the new imposed rates and the shorter repayment terms.

We are never more than a week away from “bad” capitalism which seeks only to profit from any signs of weakness and where making the numbers bigger is the only game that counts. Last week we’ve had two of the most obscene examples of the genre. The iconic American toy store Toys R Us is about to shut its doors after 70 years in business. On the BBC website there is a varnished version of the story behind the closure which looks like it was written by Philip Green. It cites market forces, changed shopping habits and a failure to identify fast-moving trends. Nowhere does it mention the catastrophic management practices of the Wall Street vultures which purchased the firm and then saddled it with billions in unsustainable debt.

Nor does it cite the private equity firms and hedge fund predators who, after buying the firm 13 years ago, have extracted around £350 million in profits. As experienced workers with decades of service depart with nothing, a small cadre of executives who acquiesced in the process of stripping this company bare are leaving with millions in pay-offs. It’s the same sort of fate that befell BHS and the same sums of money that were leached out the firm before it went bust. But we all forget so easily, don’t we? And the corporate raiders know this very well.

We also discovered, through a long report in the influential US business news agency that assorted hedge funds and corporate speculators have been exploiting the greed and dishonesty of some of the UK’s most respected polling companies. The vast majority of UK voters have always believed that elections can’t be bought; apparently though they can – and easily. All it takes is a pre-agreement to sell your polling data to the speculators an hour or so before the polls close thus giving them an opportunity to make a multimillion pound killing by speculating on the result with prior knowledge of it. In the minutes after Brexit polling had finished in June, 2016, Nigel Farage astonishingly conceded defeat and the markets reacted accordingly. Those who had purchased prior knowledge of the outcome from the polling firms were able to fill their boots. Similar patterns of suspicious activity were evident towards the end of the referendum on Scottish independence. According to Bloomberg a cosy cartel of pollsters and psephologists were selling their privileged information fully aware of how such information would be used.

It’s the favoured strategy by capitalism’s high priests: everything has a price; anyone can be bought and nothing can ever really be protected … apart from their interests. It’s never about wealth creation but all about wealth concealment. And there are never victims, only suckers.