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If British history is, as has been suggested, an endless struggle between dashing freebooters and conscientious plodders, the freebooters have been in the ascendancy for far too long
"Britain's bankers are swashbuckling pirates in a long tradition that stretches back 400 years. Pirating is not exclusive to Britain, but we have always been adept at stealing and extorting under the guise of free trade. Britain's merchant class created the largest empire the world has known using the techniques learned on the high seas: much of the booty our forebears crowed about was money deftly stolen from others (who mostly stole it themselves). The East India Company gave the lead and successive governments followed.
In a recent BBC4 documentary, our history was characterised as a tension between roundheads and cavaliers. Cavaliers, from Sir Walter Raleigh onwards, rarely relied on efficiency or productivity or having the largest ships, but skirmished with frigates to bamboozle and destroy the enemy.
In the modern business world, that equates to waking up each day with a determination to live on your wits and deploy every tactic in your bag of tricks to sell whatever you have to hand.
David Cameron was cast as the inheritor of the cavalier tradition. Bob Diamond, the deposed Barclays boss, is less colourful but represents an industry that revels in dealmaking and bamboozling its clients. Each day is another opportunity to invent a form of words, a complex scheme that can command a premium over the simpler fare offered by rivals.
Financial services, the arms industry and the pharmaceuticals business can lay claim to being the UK's biggest net exporters. The balance of payments is bad at the moment, but would be much worse without them. Yet they all have one foot in the gutter."…
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Banks, drugmakers and arms dealers are the new face of our piratical past
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It is heartening to note that, while the British establishment's behaviour is shameful, most ordinary people still live by a moral code
British establishment:A cesspool of corruption
Henry Porter writing in today’s Observer (8 July 2012) asks a very important question:
“One thing we can say after the succession of eye-popping scandals in public life is that the British must be one of the most stoical, resilient and phlegmatic people on this planet. But how long will we continue shrugging our shoulders at the scandals in banking, politics, journalism, the police and the priesthood? Our forbearance seems inexhaustible but at some stage it's surely going to run out.”…
…”Dream on, you will say. The British establishment is incapable of reforming itself. The only reason there is any kind of hand-wringing at the moment is because people got caught. There's no sense of remorse, no understanding among the perpetrators of the impact of these scandals, as was evident watching Bob Diamond at the Treasury select committee or any of Rupert Murdoch's clan over the past year. Nothing ever changes, goes the argument, only fundamental revolution will prevent bankers and politicians and businessmen behaving in the way that they always have.
I have sympathy with these frustrations because corruption and abuse of power is always accompanied by incompetence. Police officers who are being bribed and wined and dined by powerful interests cannot at the same time carry out their duties efficiently and for the good of the public. Bankers who preside over a system of illegal rate fixing do not run a sound and responsible bank. Politicians who are doing deals behind closed doors with media owners are bound to allow these deals to skew policy and damage the quality of government. Where there is a lapse of ethical standards, a general decline in performance is the corollary.
Some suggest that the abuse of power at the top is simply a reflection of a decline in general standards. I am not persuaded of this for the reason that I think there are heartening levels of decency still to be found across the population, together with persistent signs of understanding and tolerance. You don't have to have an unfeasibly rosy view of British society to agree that most people behave honestly most of the time.
Something did go wrong in our society during the last decade and half – maybe well before – which explains these scandals.
Britain engulfed in corruption: The chosen economic model is the culprit: HOW THE NEOLIBERAL PROJECT EMBEDS CORRUPTION IN BRITAIN
This was more than a few individuals mislaying their moral compass or being encouraged to think they could get away with something because of light-touch regulation. It has to do with the way we tolerated a vast increase in the wealth divide. A society that allows bankers to be remunerated in millions at the same time as there is widespread child poverty has lost its way. Attitudes that encouraged greater and greater inequity are the same ones that created the conditions for the abuse of power that so many of these scandals reveal. The common denominators are a disdain for the rights and welfare of ordinary people and a decline in compassion for the less fortunate.”…
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Capitalism is in crisis across the globe – but what on earth might the alternative be?
Well, some are saying: what about Marx and Engels?
“Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."…
…” Sales of Das Kapital, Marx's masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse… "The revival of interest in Marxism, especially for young people comes because it provides tools for analysing capitalism, and especially capitalist crises such as the one we're in now"…
… Could Britain have its Tahrir Square, its equivalent to Castro's 26th of July Movement? Let a young woman dream. After last year's riots and today with most of Britain alienated from the rich men in its government's cabinet, only a fool would rule it out…"one thing about Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance of our factories, that's to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?"…
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