Sebastian Payne

Boris Johnson: greed can be good

Boris Johnson prides himself on being one of the few politicians who gets away with saying the unsayable. He stuck to that theme tonight with his Margaret Thatcher lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies, in which he argued that greed isn’t a bad thing. He said:

‘But I also hope that there is no return to that spirit of Loadsamoney heartlessness – figuratively riffling banknotes under the noses of the homeless; and I hope that this time the Gordon Gekkos of London are conspicuous not just for their greed – valid motivator though greed may be for economic progress – as for what they give and do for the rest of the population, many of whom have experienced real falls in their incomes over the last five years.’

This idea that greed is good will be the one that hits the newspapers tomorrow. And Boris was also pretty keen to argue that ‘like it or not, the free market economy is the only show in town’, even though some of his Conservative colleagues have spent this week modifying their language on the market in response to attacks from Labour.

But there was another very important strand in these speech that owed more to John Major than to Thatcher, even though he argued that the two would agree on the current situation. Boris said:

‘I worry that there are too many cornflakes who aren’t being given a good enough chance to rustle and hustle their way to the top. We gave the packet a good shake in the 1960s; and Mrs Thatcher gave it another good shake in the 1980s with the sale of the council houses. Since then there has been a lot of evidence of a decline in social mobility, as Sir John Major has trenchantly pointed out.’

In fact, much of the speech was about that cornflake packet, and what Thatcher would be doing now to shake it up again and encourage as much economic equality as was possible (though Boris carefully caveated his argument by pointing out that ‘some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity’).

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