“It is juvenile to think business can be easily divided into good and bad, like characters in a fairy tale,” says Luke Johnson in the Financial Times. Yet the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, appears to believe in “such a fantasy”. Real commercial life is much more “gritty and complicated”. Should BAE, which Miliband “correctly supports”, be shut down because it sells weapons of death? Is the Royal Mail, a company which continues to soak up taxpayer subsidies because it won’t modernise, ‘good’? “Arguably, the worst sort of company is one that makes chronic losses”, goes bust and causes chaos. Hence any ‘good’ business must be “efficient and profitable as a first principle”.
We could always send Miliband to “infect” the vast new market economies of Asia with our “sclerosis”, says Boris Johnson in The Daily Telegraph. Their capitalists need to hear Ed’s message because as the UK economy “hobbles” along, China is still growing at 9% and India at 8%. Let Ed go and explain ‘bad’ capitalism and his “insight – that you need more state control, more regulation and higher taxes on wealth-creators”.
It’s easy to sneer, but Miliband is right, says Will Hutton in The Observer. “Successive British governments have not distinguished between good and bad capitalism in informing how they regulate, tax and procure goods and services.” His speech may have been flawed, but it “represented an argument that needs to be made”. It did, agrees Peter Oborne in The Daily Telegraph. One of the unintended consequences of Margaret Thatcher’s reforms in the 1980s was the rise of a “new class of feral rich who abandoned the ordinary morality or sense of civic duty felt by previous generations”. New Labour, with its “unashamed worship of ostentatious wealth, made the problem much worse”. Miliband’s vision, “however imperfectly sketched out”, challenges George Osborne to give a much fuller account of the kind of society that will stand once the gloom has lifted.