On David Cameron and ‘moral capitalism’: reply to Simon Heffer

Posted on Wednesday 4 February, 2009
Filed Under Conservative Party

 

DAVID Cameron is not a Bolshevik; I feel I have to make this statement for the record, after reading Simon Heffer’s claim in the Daily Telegraph this morning that the Tory leader wants to ‘Sovietize capitalism out of existence’.

Given my political background, I probably do know rather more about this sort of thing than Mr Heffer. Until he can point to the exact paragraph of the Conservative Party manifesto advocating the transfer of power to the Tunbridge Wells council of workers’ and peasants’ deputies, readers are warned to suspect such contentions of hyberbole.

Yet oddly enough, it is only two months since our columnist pronounced that Labour’s move in buying bank shares marked ‘not quite the sovietisation of Britain’, but nevertheless ‘a pretty good start’.

Now – in a truly remarkable display of the Cunning of Reason – Cameron stands revealed by History as the Lenin de nos jours, the man with a (central) plan, alone capable of resolving the situation of dual power obtaining in Britain today decisively in favour of the proletariat.

Heffer’s disgust centres on the ‘moral capitalism’ speech our Old Etonian friend delivered at Davos recently, which he has down as ‘one of the most shallow speeches by a supposedly serious politician that I have ever read’.

That’s harsh; centrist boilerplate is much of muchness, no matter which politician delivers it, The speech in question – ‘greener, safer, fairer, blah, blah, blah’ – is no more egregious than other examples of the genre.

Yet Heffer avers – without real evidence, and via a detour into the theology of Ayn Rand – that its political content is some way to the left of Gordon Brown. It is described as ‘no better than socialism’, and condemned to culminate in ‘a socialist-style wealth-limiting, freedom-starved command economy’. Sorry, Simon, but what Cameron said was is nowhere near that promising as that.

The Conservative crypto-communist’s purported offence was to impugn the virtue of free markets. Heffer sees the very phrase ‘moral capitalism’ as a tautology:

Capitalism is deeply moral and hardly needs the adjective to qualify it. It is moral because it is about the exercise of free will between buyers and sellers: and few things can be more moral than allowing someone to be free. Capitalism is about the link between effort and reward. It is about the creation of wealth according to the quality of one’s enterprise.

Except that none of this is true. Capitalism is in its very nature based on exploitation; the exploitation of labour power by capital, through the extraction of surplus value from the working class.

And spare us that tosh about effort, reward and enterprise; the bulk of wealth in capitalist society is inherited. The free enterprise revolution started by Thatcher and continued under Blair has seen a sharp decline in social mobility. Britain remains a class society. Ask any old Old Etonian.

And, lo, Mr Cameron complains about our capitalism having been “winner takes all”, an assertion that is fundamentally untrue (for capitalism has enriched almost everyone in the free world to some degree) …

All that Heffer has to explain here is how come a majority of the population of an almost entirely-capitalist planet lives in poverty, while the economic downturn has meant government bail-outs for the bankers and the risk of redundancy and repossession for the rest of us.

…. but would not be immoral even if it were. After all, those who take the risks and have the superior judgment should have the rewards: anything else is communism.

If you are going to define ‘communism’ as anything other than dog eat dog, Mr Heffer, it is little wonder that the doctrine might be about to enjoy renewed appeal.

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