I am not imagining mythical fat cat bosses. I was pointing out the elephant in the productivity room, which is that net (not gross) productivity (or profit, if you like) is raised by paying less for more work.

Agree the world has moved on and the picture is global. Funnily enough the union movement always was (ref ‘The Internationale’), even when industrial concerns were parochial.

So perhaps we should indeed now be focussing on combatting the threat of companies with non-unionised cheap workforces in other countries selling cheap goods into the UK. Very few win from that scenario. However, 40 years of adherence to the global free-market capitalism model has prevented any ‘interference’ that might prevent this.

Or are you suggesting British workers be paid Chinese wages? With Chinese conditions? Is this ‘thinking globally’?

I am in danger of losing my usual cool. Well done, John. Unwashed proles. My mother, my father, me? Doctors? Have you ever done a day’s work for an employer in your life? (other than the one that possibly unwisely gave you boots and a gun). Because if you have, then what the F*CK do you think you are talking about?

OK. Calmed down. You talk of the importance of rich people because they pay for the rest of us – so you say. You overlook the two connected facts that a) Wealth is created through the activity of us worker-proles and b) the economic imperative is to pay as little as it is possible to get away with for the most amount of this work. The logical end-point without the threat to withdraw labour is subsistence wages (can’t have them dying on the job, old boy) ie none of the created wealth goes to those who created it. Thus unions are necessary. The risk of withdrawn labour and the self-organisation of proles provides a counter-imperative to ensure that the wealth really does ‘trickle down’ (it doesn’t trickle, it is actually worked for in a functioning economy, and competed for in a non-functioning one. ‘Trickledown wealth’ was both a clever and a nonsensical deliberate coinage, like Ministry of Plenty).

It strikes me you had a bitter personal experience that has coloured things for you. Uppity prole make you choke on your garlic testicle?

Re. Standing up – it might be possible to fight state subsidy with state subsidy – China are putting a lot more into their dumping of steel at a loss than we would need to put our little corner of niche but strategically useful high-quality output on an equal footing – I don’t know – but certainly conflating this desire to actively help the industry (whatever the methods, rights and wrongs of doing this) with ‘minorities’ standing up for themselves by voting for the opposition is not really an above-board piece of rhetoric either.

I wish I could remember the exact quote, but on Newsnight the other.. erm.. night, Laura Kuenssberg came up with a classic – something along the lines of ‘Despite his justifiable unpopularity, Corbyn has proved popular’.

She’s full of great one-liners like that. Mrs Beermat and I spotted Kuenssberg’s bias a while back, though it does seem a one-off.

I think we need to be clear on our terms here. Russia is a Capitalist country. No, shock, horror… yes, it is. It has been for a while now. Undemocratic and corrupt, but most definitely Capitalist. As is China.

It is not capitalism with a small ‘c’ that has failed us, and I am personally no more an anti-capitalist than I am a Socialist. It’s a ridiculous stance, it would be hard to avoid the actual use of money, and while that’s the case one person will always have more or less of it than someone else!

It is the placement of Capitalism with a big C (the belief that the accumulation of capital is a wealth generator in its own right, a misapprehension fuelled by another actual ‘ism’) at the heart of an economy, over and above actual trade or industry, that doesn’t work. This is sometimes called ‘free market capitalism’ – as opposed to some imagined ‘un-free’ market, but it means the elevation of money ownership to the status where it needs to be rewarded with.. well, money, and that somehow makes us all better off.

It didn’t work at the time of the South Sea bubble (another failure of perspective), and it doesn’t work now. Just like the placement of Socialism with a big ‘S’ at the core of an economy has been shown not to work too. This is my only point, I am not advocating any kind of ‘Socialist State’, and neither would anybody else necessarily be who used their democratic right to vote for anything other than extreme Conservatism (they’d certainly be disappointed if they were).

Sometimes, reading the tabloids, it feels like ‘Reds under the bed’ all over again.

Correct! I am wary of ‘isms’ generally, so won’t climb into a box like ‘socialist’ without heavily qualifying it. People following isms tend to believe their leaders have all the answers (Fascists, Socialists, Communists), and I don’t. If anything, I am a utilitarianist (which I don’t think is a word).

I don’t think the vote is irrelevant, I just don’t agree that expressing a view contrary to that of the elected government is somehow undemocratic, which I think is what you are suggesting?

Progressive taxation:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_tax

Fair enough about the majority using the NHS and state education. For what it’s worth, though, plenty of middle class people ‘go private’. I don’t think they are super wealthy. You misdiagnosed me as delusional – and as a socialist!

There’s nothing to say that progressive taxation of the users shouldn’t be used to pay for it. In fact it already is. However, there is a shortfall to be made up. And it is pretty damn clear that there’s a tax-take out there that’s currently being avoided.. our own Prime Minister could tell us all about that, I’m sure. It might not pay for it all, but that doesn’t by itself make trying to raise more from the super wealthy the wrong thing to do. And it doesn’t make me a socialist to suggest it – at least not on this side of the Atlantic.

Maybe it was ‘hair cuts?’… to keep JG happy?