Profit and the common man

Commentators talk about the political “weather” referring to the key ideas that dominate the political debate. The party conference season this year could have witnessed a political climate change, triggered by two proposals in Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour Party conference which set the ideological weather-cocks spinning.

He promised that, if elected, Labour would give a spur to house-building by confiscating building land that developers were holding on to for future use in the hope of greater profit, and would enact a 20-month freeze in the price that households pay for gas and electricity. Both measures were seen by the Right as fundamental interference in the workings of market forces. He was, David Cameron said in his own conference speech, promising a return to “1970s socialism”.

It is possible to construe these events rather differently. The Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has also attacked developers who hoard land instead of building houses on it; and the public is manifestly fed up with the soaring price of energy, suspecting collusion if not conspiracy among energy companies. Nor is it accurate to depict Mr Miliband’s stance, as for instance the Daily Mail has insidiously done, as a declaration of war on market economics.

It suggested Mr Miliband was heavily influenced by his father’s Marxist philosophy, tendentiously deducing from it that Miliband Sr – despite being a Belgian refugee who volunteered to serve in the Royal Navy in wartime – “hated Britain”. In fact, in describing the lack of price competition in energy as a “market failure”, Labour’s leader was referring to a condition even free-market economists recognise as valid grounds for intervention. Opinion polls are saying that the public is actually to the left of Labour on this, and would welcome the renationalisation of the energy supply industry.

Are both parties, therefore, misreading the public mood? After the financial collapse of 2008 it was widely expected that neo-liberal capitalism, under sustained criticism for having failed, would have to be replaced by something better. That has not happened: it has been “business as usual”.

Mr Cameron’s speech ignored the fact that the crisis had been a major factor in forcing up the national deficit. There was, he said, nothing wrong with profit. Indeed, Mr Miliband himself did not raise fundamental issues about the market economy, merely its effect in two areas. The hoped-for clash of fundamental ideologies between the parties that some commentators were anticipating seems to have been postponed.

So who speaks for ordinary people, who might welcome a change in the economic weather, and might prefer an alternative to a system where pursuit of profit comes first and last? One answer may well be Pope Francis. During his visit to Sardinia he lambasted “an economic system that has at its centre an idol called money”. In this he is consistent with Pope Benedict XVI, who declared in his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate: “Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.” If Mr Miliband had said that, the public could have heard the words it was waiting for.