Sorry, Tristram — but capitalism is just what the British public does

anon

"Poor old Engels. Here was a paradox: socialism was an ideology about the masses, which portrayed the ruling class as the exploiters. And yet the ruling class seemed to like this creed more than the oiks."

Always the way...

TomTom

Socialism is alien to British Culture - sorry English Culture. It may have a following in Scotland where second-raters like Brown imagine themselves as intellectuals of the first order, but that Socialism usually involves re-distribution of English money to Scottish Party Bosses to buy clan votes like some Afghan warlord.

England is more John Locke than Thomas Hobbes, or was until Leviathan took control. Socialism was essentially a secular Jewish Millennialist "Religion" formed in France and Germany and never took hold until Methodism died in the Labour Party and the Public Schoolboys came to dominate with the Harold Laski influence, sponsor of Miliband.

British people do not think of Capitalism, they simply lived in a system that was familiar until forced to live under a foreign blueprint imposed by a well-heeled apparatchik class formed during the 1939-45 War

terence patrick hewett

Tristram's rebuttal was not at all brilliant but on the level of a sixth-form essay.

Ostrich (occasionally)

Tristram Hunt should be invited to a slot on the 'Today' programme, as long as he is to be introduced by James Naughtie.

Douglas Carter

I think what Tristram should be getting close to recognising is that whilst Capitalism is associated with useful end fruits, that Government needs to grasp that there is an upper threshold at which you can appropriate those fruits and spend them.

What we currently have is a profound unwillingness to recognise that capitalism in the UK cannot provide for the voracious appetite of those who would appropriate those fruits - yet it is the capitalists blamed for the fault, not the profligacy of the State spending the wealth of those fruits.

RKing

This is the socialism that we have witnessed for 13 years recently which has led to my much reduced pension for which I paid into all my working life and as meagre as it is I am still presented with a tax bill each year.

Yet as a country we can afford to pay many unemployed about twice the amount that I get and I believe that they pay no tax!!!

Even in the good times when I worked and saved for my future I was still subsidising those who chose not to work and I am sure many of them still exist.

Yea you are welcome to Socialism Tristam but please take it with you when you leave!!

Publius

"in which I said that capitalism is **hardwired in Britain’s DNA**"

Mr Nelson. No wonder the silly Mr Hunt has contempt for you when you write phrases like this.

Publius

"To say that capitalism is British is hardly controversial. It’s not an ideology. The word is used, nowadays, to refer to whatever is not happening in the government sphere: there are as many types of capitalism as there are countries."

Really, Mr Nelson, how can you write this sort of ignorant guff?

Andrew

This debate between Nelson and Hunt is crude and insubstantial. Everyone agrees that the bankers have behaved and are behaving appallingly badly. Everyone also agrees that free loaders on the state are behaving equally badly. Everyone also agrees that doctors threatening to strike for yet more money are no better than bankers. This socialism/capitalism argument will get us nowhere. A Swede, writing for the WEF, says the aim in Sweden is "“not to socialise the economy but to liberate the citizen from all forms of subordination and dependency within the family and civil society: the poor from charity, the workers from their employers, children from parents...” Isn't it time we had a more mature debate?

Publius

"our modern history has been the triumph of shopping over politics."

And this?!

It really is time The Spectator got a new Editor.

Pot Head

Good post. To sum it up - Brits prefer Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels.

Axstane

Mr Hunt may argue brilliantly but with a forked tongue and a blind eye to reality. One sees those often in dilettante Socialists.

Brian A

You're right, capitalism isn't an ideology - it is a description of what people have actually done, i.e. to increase wealth through voluntary exchange and the price system, since the dawn of history. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that Neolithic Britons engaged in extensive trading both internally and externally.

The fact that a number of 19th Century thinkers and their later followers have devised a system that in all its practical manifestations has actively diminished wealth and individual freedom should not blind us to the reality that the extension of voluntary exchange has led to an unparalleled growth in prosperity wherever in the world it has been tried.

Andrew Taylor

Are you sure that Tristam Hunt is not rhyming slang? He is a nutter.
Please explain to me why anyone would want to get up every morning, rain or shine, to slog all day to create something successful then have much of their reward confiscated by lunatics like him to be given to someone who sits all day watching Jeremy Kyle on a widescreen TV only breaking off to take 5 year old Johnny to the doctor and demanding something for his cough because it is putting him off his fags!
Prat!

Michelle Bonwicke-Jomes

Tristram Hunt is a excellent man but what the electorate would prefer is action- The ability to put things right! A sense of duty, honesty , an ability to lead, bravery and integrity.
We do not wish our political leaders to spend too much time giving meaningful speeches especially when a certain leader will use this as another bandwaggon to jump upon to hide the fact that his party the party of the working man is still in no mans land! and has no credibility
or integrity- Just a wish to prevent progress! infact Tristrum Hunts party Labour Big state, Low on aspiration low on inspiration low on responsibilty practices the very opposite to what the root of capitalism is.

Paul Danon

You can have socialism without violent revolution. Surveys of living-standards suggest people think it reasonable for the taxpayer to subsidise hobbies and holidays for the otherwise destitute. Witness also the hue and cry over bankers' bonuses. Sadly, socialism has triumphed in most British people's minds, which is why we have three Labour-parties in parliament and Labour tax-and-spend policies being implemented by a LibCon government.

Sheumais

"redistribution, intervention and socialism"

Redistribute other people's money, intervene when they are deemed too successful and patronise those whose money you take and those you have decided need you to act for them. Some lofty regard for one's own judgement is required to declare you are always better placed to decide what is fair to be retained by those who've earned it and what is fair to be given to those who haven't. Such immodesty always seems to be apparent in those who may not have faced the same challenges as those they claim to champion, so their belief they know what is faced is not based upon experience, it is assumed. How arrogant.

Capitalism survives on aspiration, which is part of human nature. It is not peculiar to our country, it is seen throughout history and across the world. To deny that is to prove yourself incapable of understanding your fellow man and ill-equpped to assist them.

Ian Walker

Socialism, in it's Big-S form, is a busted flush - an experiment that was tried repeatedly, across multiple forms of government, society and culture.

It failed every time.

Now Einstein said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. That is where the Socialists are now, at the beginning of the 21st Century. They refuse to believe that their model of 'progressive' wealth redistribution will somehow 'lift' the poor out of poverty, despite some pretty obvious flaws in the central argument (e.g. unless everyone has exactly equal wealth there will always be 'poor' people by definition) and in the assumptions they make (e.g. that altruism is more prevalent than greed, which any honest anthropologist would snigger at)

Iain Duncan-Smith's welfare reforms are capitalist at heart, because they are all about creating the right incentives - effectively creating a market which rewards work more that it rewards idolatry - and then letting the invisible hand do it's magic. No doubt when they are successful the snivelling champagne socialists will claim them for their own and pretend it was "Bevan's original vision" all along or something.

michael

20% of benefit claimants demonstrate entrepreneurial flair...on the fiddle.- And we all know that's just scratching the surface.
We are a nation of micro capitalists, it's just that the politics of social liberalism teaches us to be destructively envious of 'commercial' success....Cos it's good for the tax take and subsequent vote grabbing cash-splurge.

Heartless Curmudgeon

. . . the template of Cameron and the Spectator . . .

What a total ignoramus. The H2B has no more affinity with the (supposedly) Conservative Speccy than the moon does with water.

Publius

Andrew writes:
"This debate between Nelson and Hunt is crude and insubstantial." etc.

Thank you, Andrew. If Fraser Nelson is not prepared to write intelligently, I really wish he would just keep quiet.

Andy Carpark

Wot, no graph?

Heartless Curmudgeon

It may well be appropriate to wish people of sanity "Gong Xi Fa Ca!"

ellis000

Socialism is no more in the DNA of the British/English than Capitalism is. What is in the DNA of a large percentage of the population is an unfortunate inability to see the world through facts but purely through misguided emotion: witness the mass hysteria at the death of Diana, over-reaction to paedophila viz Sarah's law, the rise of the celebrity and reality TV and it's the bankers' fault etc. The problem with the Tristrams of this world is their dependence on a social philosophy that is as damaging as it is redundant. Reality is working to pay your bills and taxes to support oneself and one's familly and those in society who cannot help themselves. Those who see reality as working to pay for the welfare of the undeserving, idle and feckless are simply deluded.

HFC

...capitalism is just what the British public does.

Quite so. I have my car serviced, my house painted and decorated, my plumbing and heating attended to, my garden dug over, my windows cleaned and so on by local capitalists who quite rightly see themselves as working class...and they all like to charge me a discounted price for cash.

I wonder why.

PayDirt

Capitalism is one of those words which now mean whatever you want it to mean, as such it is pretty much worthless. Who the fucj started this useless discussion? It is anachronistic, it only makes sense if used in its historical context.

alexsandr

we must not forget Labour was not spawned by socialism but by trades unions whose aim in life is to extort more and more for their members from their employers.

Nicholas

He is right that Britain has always had a cabal of shrill, noisy, bolshy, socialist types clamouring for attention as being holier than thou, but it is a recent development based rather dishonestly on previous British "socialist" models. And those leading the charge are mostly privileged, ex-public school and Oxbridge educated professional politicians, busy creating a new elite as they denounce the old one.

Fraser

Shame all the main political parties are socialists who practice, whatever they may believe, in an expanded role of the state and progressive taxation.

Tom Pride

Sheumais
January 23rd, 2012 10:44am
“and patronise those whose money you take”

If my ears serve me right, I am sure I heard Tristram Hunt tell Jon Moulton, following a difference of opinion, that he should be out of the studio and getting on with working. It might have been meant humorously but it was incredibly condescending, verging on rude. (Daily Politics, maybe 10 Jan 2012 but can’t check as it is iplayer expired.)

Jeremy

South Korea - now there's a nation of shopkeepers. The flipside being that the pavements are terrible; people debase themselves to the extreme in order to beg in the marketplace, and those suffering from the twin evils of extreme old age and poverty sit on the streets - even in the depths of their freezing winter - in order to sell meagre piles of vegetables. There was one very old lady doing just this for whom I felt particularly sorry - she had clearly been something of a beauty in her youth.

Perhaps there is something to be said for the Department of Health and Social Security, after all.

Sir Everard Digby

The political classes lack the will to think outside the box.

Perhaps Haldane was right when he said:
'Capitalism did not arise because capitalists stole the land or the workmen's tools, but because it was more efficient than feudalism. It will perish because it is not merely less efficient than socialism, but actually self-destructive'

Capitalism is perhaps an evolutionary phase and we seem to be searching for the next stage in development.

Of course,what Labour refer to as Socialism is no such thing -it is state-controlled envy.

Sheumais

Tom Pride, I had the great misfortune to see Tristram Hunt on Newsnight on Thursday. He claimed to be interested in debate, but displayed little interest in anyone else's view. You may guess I haven't warmed to him and nor, it seems, has Daniel Finkelstein.

Malfleur

Could the British debt, now running at 507% of GDP, be put down to the dynamic immigrant labour workforce which is seen by governments over the last 14 years as so essential to the health of our economy?

Tiberius

According to one of the contributors above, "Tristam Hunt is an excellent man..."; to those of us who have watched this nauseating man on frequent tv appearances, and sepecially his loathsome display on a Newsnight 'debate' last week, he is not excellent, but smug, vain and insufferably full of himself. His arguments were, are, threadbare, adolescent generalisations, and he, a characteristic of the gobby and intolerant left, insists on smearing others and interrupting as the desire arises. Truly Mandelson's political catamite.

Simon Stephenson.

It seems to me that on one side of this argument we have a group of people who believe that human nature is such that if individuals are left to themselves they will cause the construction of a world which is paradise for everyone living in it. The other side of the argument has another group who believe that individual humanity is incapable of anything good, and that therefore collective decision-making is the only acceptable form of social organisation.

What about those of us who believe that pure capitalism does too little to negate mankind's inherent evil; that pure socialism does too little to nurture mankind's inherent genius; and that far and away the best form of social organisation is one which sees the need for a balance between autonomy and control, because it understands that neither of the simplistic polarities offer much that is attractive to most of the people.

CS

TomTom would be right if we redefined England as just the Home Counties.

John Bowman

Intersting.

Capitalism is hard wired into British DNA, says Fraser.

Socialism is hard wired into the British mindset, says Tristram.

Well, the former is a result natural evolution, the latter a result of pernicious indoctrination.

Socialism - altruistic collectivism and State ownership of property, people and their labour - is counter to British tenets of freedom, liberty, right to own property, self-reliance and upward mobility through the generations.

Tom Pride

Sheumais

Yes, I caught that too. I don’t think I‘ve seen the Fink so riled before – told the story of his grand(?)-father escaping the type of regime which results from the policies supported by Tristram Hunt. Real emotion from the normally coolly analytical Fink. Reminded me of Michael Howard’s “This Grammar school boy” altercation with Blair.

Tristram Hunt might well be highly intellectual, I don’t know, but, what one sees of him doesn’t convince. As you say, he doesn’t seem to engage with an argument but sort of flirts around on his own plane.

Fergus Pickering

Are not the Home Counties where true Englishness resides, where most of the wealth is created to subsidise the rest in idleness and leftist ideology? Home rule for the Home counties.

Cynic

"Here was a paradox: socialism was an ideology about the masses, which portrayed the ruling class as the exploiters. And yet the ruling class seemed to like this creed more than the oiks." The oiks had their feet on the ground. The leisured classes had, well, the leisure to discuss ideas; they didn't have to be practical.

Cynic

And a happy new year to you, too, Heartless Curmudgeon. I wonder what the year of the dragon will bring - St George to the rescue, possibly?

arnoldo87

From Simon Stephenson - another Polonian classic:-

"What about those of us who believe that pure capitalism does too little to negate mankind's inherent evil; that pure socialism does too little to nurture mankind's inherent genius; and that far and away the best form of social organisation is one which sees the need for a balance between autonomy and control, because it understands that neither of the simplistic polarities offer much that is attractive to most of the people."

That would be about 100% of us, then, Simon.

Andy Leeds

What's actually 'hardwired into Britain's DNA' is Liberty. The British (particularly the English) loath authoritarianism and being bossed around - they are rather an anarchic people. And Socialism, whether it be the version peddled by the Labour Party or that peddled by Hitler, just doesn't fit with this desire and love of Liberty.

Frank P

Tiberius (1.34pm)

Entirely concur with your assessment; in fact, he is the most perfect examplar of justified pejorative Cockney Rhyming Slang that I have yet encountered, and considering his surname-sake Jeremy; Crispin Blunt and the infamous Anthony Blunt are all in the list of contenders, that's some achievement.

Simon Stephenson.

arnoldo87 : 4.27pm

Really? 100%?

Why then does just about every contribution to the discussion argue either that a piece of regulation or control will lead to the destruction of the free-market system, or that any relaxation thereof will lead to mass oppression by the "rich", and eight-year-old children reappearing in workhouses?

Maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems to me that very little public debate relates to the issues themselves, and just about all of it to the pushing of one prejudice or another.

Nick Kaplan

"Adam Smith's “invisible hand” (which, one should remember, was a satirical attack on laissez-faire morality, drawn from Shakespeare's Macbeth)"

Does anyone know what this means or what the basis of it is? This seems to completely contradict everything I know about Adam Smith...

MilkSnatcher

Terribly sorry but who gives a monkeys about whether some working class movement in the distant 19th century has somehow continued in the British person's DNA, a bit like a dormant virus that erupts occasionally - say like, er, herpes. We are faced with sinelge-minded competition from China, Singapore, the US, Indonesia, Hong Kong etc etc. All very well to have jolly hockey sticks history lessons but that won't create a single job.

Bickers

Hunt is another useful idiot of the Left; a privileged, arrogant, vain and lazy member of the Islington chattering classes, who add nothing to the wealth creation of the Nation, rather just sucking on the tax payer's teat. Their ramblings 'from authority' have increasingly been shown to be shallow and destructive to the Nation State and the people they claim to want to help.

Capitalism is nothing more complicated than the efficient allocation of resources, which the West no longer practices because it's been hijacked by the Left. Ironically, it'll be communist China that'll force the West to return to the discipline of true capitalism or wither on the vine.

William of London

Socialism = theft. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

david

As Napoleon so rightly declared, a nation of shopkeepers.

Errr as far as I'm aware Napoleon never actually said it, if anyone has any evidence, i.e. when were etc. could they please let me know.

Dimoto

"Capitalism v's Socialism" is just another ridiculous posit from a bunch of half-baked German social theorists (is there any other kind ? they are still at it - read some of the tosh emanating from Merkel's troupe).

Brits are pragmatic.

Representative democracy seems to work OK.

An unwritten constitution, capable of incremental change/improvement seems to work OK.

Free markets and free enterprise seem to work OK, (we've tried bouts of public ownership, but they've been a disaster).

Tolerance and live-and-let-live is the way to go, you mind your business and I'll mind mine.

A social safety-net is probably necessary, but is a bugger to get right. We just have to keep plugging away.

If you want daft "grand schemes" and "theories of history", go look in (the disfunctional) France and Germany.

If the Anglo-Saxons hadn't written the German constitution for them, they would probably still be stuck with a succession of "strong-man" presidents/Kaisers.