The free market in danger

Young people say capitalism has failed them. They’re right.
We must change the system to save it

It would be easy to attack the London spin-off of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which manifested itself in the form of a 300-tent encampment outside St Paul’s last weekend. Their political agenda? The same, meaningless, Dave Spartesque gobbledegook which has been a feature of anti-capitalist demos for the past decade and a half, such as the demand for ‘Structural change towards authentic global equality’ and ‘an end to the activities of those causing oppression’. Look for leadership and what do you see? The usual old suspects: Billy Bragg, Julian Assange and assorted vegans, unilateral disarmers and other hangers-on.

We know where this sort of protest leads: to the shattering of windows in one or two branches of McDonald’s, a police van rocked from side to side, kettling, accusations of police overreaction caught on camera-phones, before the exhausted Dave and Deidres are finally dekettled and allowed to slope off back to their squats — and not a few Rupert and Lucindas back to their trust-fund flats.
Yet there is a very big difference between the ‘Occupy’ movement and the regular eruptions of left-wing anger over the past 50 years. The previous ones all occurred against a backdrop of rising wealth and increasing home-ownership. Anyone plotting revolution under those conditions was doomed from the start, because they had to sell their idea of socialist revolution against a more attractive alternative: the opportunity to sign up to capitalism — to get a job, a car, a house and all the rest.

Occupy London Stock Exchange, on the other hand, takes place against a background of declining wealth. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the median British family will have lost 7 per cent — £2,080 of its income in real terms between 2009/10 and 2012/13.