When Jeremy Corbyn said a fair society would not contain billionaires, it did not seem controversial to me.
The existence of an individual with access to one thousand million pounds (or dollars) can only seem acceptable to people who think gross inequality is a good idea. The usual culprits have sprung to the defence of the super-rich.
Yet most of those supporters of egregious wealth have expressed their concern, over the last few years, about the increasing polarisation of wealth in society. Watching social wealth become increasingly polarised is, they have been telling us, unjust and likely to result in ‘social disorder’. Yet they are disingenuously comfortable with the existence of extreme wealth.
When Jeremy Corbyn announced a Labour government would go after billionaires who enriched themselves by taking advantage of a ‘rigged system’ they were quick to criticise him. But from my point of view his personalised attack on individual billionaires is only intended to win votes in the general election. Labour needs to make left-sounding noises to try and bolster its support among working class voters who no longer see the Labour Party as the party that represents their class.
To illustrate his point he named several individuals whose wealth he thought would be easy to criticise. Jim Ratcliffe was one of them.
Ratcliffe is the chief executive of Ineos, a petrochemical company he founded. He still owns 60 per cent of the shares. The company owns several petrol refineries and is responsible for about one third of the industrial greenhouse gases produced in Scotland. Obviously an easy target – a bogey man. An evil man who poisons the planet.
Mike Ashley was also one of the named billionaires. Poor Mike only has a couple of billion, so he is not a very big billionaire. But he still gets into the list because of the bad publicity he has garnered over the last few years as the boss of Sports Direct. His company has been at the forefront of promoting the use of zero hours contracts, and has been fined for paying staff an effective wage which was lower than the legal national minimum. Jeff Bezos, a far wealthier billionaire than ‘poor’ Mike Ashley, does not make it on to Corbyn’s list of excessively rich people. Bezos’s staff at Amazon warehouses are arguably just as badly exploited as Ashley’s Sports Direct employees. But you only need one bogey man to illustrate your point. Exploitative employer chosen – and Corbyn has ticked that box.
Then there is the Duke of Westminster. Don’t get me started. The Westminster family paid zero inheritance tax when his father died. Hugh Grosvenor became the biggest landlord in the UK (with the possible exception of the Queen). He now owns billions of pounds worth of property in Mayfair and Belgravia and lives off the proceeds of his ancestors’ accumulation of property.
And finally Jeremy’s list included Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire who uses his wealth to exercise political influence, and reserves his greatest venom for political views which he considers threaten his vested interests.
But for all the harumph and bluster, picking out individual hate figures is an exercise in concealing the Labour Party’s determination not to significantly interfere with the ability of exploiters to exploit. They want to address the most egregious examples of exploitation, and at the same time defend a system based entirely on exploitation.
The Labour Party once claimed to want to renationalise the railways (and other privatised utilities). Now they say they want to ‘bring them back into public ownership’ by waiting until their franchises expire. And any re-nationalisation of the other utilities includes generous compensation for the current owners. Their reward for milking the captive consumers they have been ripping off for years is – to get their money back. So their capital remains intact and can be moved to another sector. They can continue reaping the rewards of owning vast fortunes and not having to sell their labour for a living.
The right-wing of the Labour Party want to declare themselves the ‘party of Remain’. For the working class the Labour Party is the ‘party of Maintain’. They want to maintain capitalism, maintain exploitation, and maintain capitalist profits, by tweaking its worst excesses in order to save it.