Capitalism has failed to deliver a level playing field

To break into this elite you must have financial reserves of around half a billion pounds. At present only five nations – Spain, Germany, Italy, France and England – possess the backing of media franchises and sponsors sufficient to provide them with this sort of cash.

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The European football authorities have gerrymandered the arrangements governing participation in its grandest competition to ensure that it is virtually impossible for any club outwith these five countries to win it. The system rewards only the richest clubs while penalising those less fortunate. This, though, doesn’t prevent me from hoping that one day my team, Celtic FC, will repeat their triumph of 1967.

In the theatre of politics I also dream that I might be permitted to live in a country where the essential values of socialism underpin our way of life. In this all strategic policy-making will be fuelled by a basic desire to meet the needs of the many and not the few. It’s unlikely that this will ever happen in my lifetime either but it doesn’t stop me dreaming.

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For the past 40 years or so I have read and listened to professional economists and the politicians who feed off their theories tell us that any system of government driven purely by socialist principles must always fail. They point out that basic human failings such as greed, venality and the male thirst for power and the means to cling on to it at any cost will inevitably come to choke whatever sense of moral rectitude may have initially guided them. They also proclaim the market as the only true arbiter of who must increase and who must diminish. To them the market is infallible.

This would be easier to swallow if it could be proven that free market capitalism works in those countries which have embraced it most. Let’s accept that in judging whether capitalism “works” we simply measure the living standards of the majority of those whose existences are affected by its conduct.

By this measure you don’t need to possess a degree in economics to acknowledge that capitalism has failed utterly. In the UK the rule of capitalism and the free market has always held sway. Yet, at no time has this country, despite its natural wealth and its status as a highly evolved educational and technological polity, ever been without a massive gap between its richest citizens and poorest. At all times the latter has greatly outnumbered the former.

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Consequently, we have never been anywhere near the best that we could have been simply because this country’s political arrangements ensure that while the cream occasionally rises to the top so also does a significant quantum of dross supported by inherited privilege and wealth. It will then attain influence in the UK with disastrous consequences in banking, international diplomacy, the law and military engagement.

It’s why we had the 2008 financial crisis, the Suez debacle, the Birmingham Six and Hillsborough and any number of battlefield catastrophes from Balaclava to the Somme to Iraq. All this happened because of a system which rewarded well-connected mediocrity and at the first sight of a level playing field moved quickly to tilt it.

A few days have elapsed since the publication of the SNP’s Growth Report. Thus far it has received a cautious almost grudging welcome from the forces of the Right and a degree of disappointment from influential commentators on the Left. I regarded it as a stepping stone; a means to an end; something that can be pulled apart and re-constructed when independence happens. Certainly, it is a different beast to anything I might have produced. This would have included a programme of renationalisation; immediate plans to tax private schools out of existence; an end to private healthcare; a system that penalised all companies not paying a real living wage and land-grabs on those Scottish estates where it can be proven that this soil was dishonestly obtained in the first place.

Others have even proclaimed the politically circumspect character of the Growth Commission as a joyous signal that socialism in Scotland is impossible. As my esteemed colleague Michael Fry put it yesterday in this newspaper: “There’s not going to be any Scottish socialism, at least no more than we’ve got already. Scottish socialism has peaked … and quite a long time ago.”

Fry is a welcome and important voice in the Yes movement who has articulated a plausible apologia for independence from a right-wing perspective. Yet his depiction of what constitutes socialism is based on a hopelessly outdated model which more resembles that of the First Congress of the Comintern of newly Communist Russia in 1919.

I daresay that if Fry were to inspect his own quotidian choices and values he’d find them to be drawn from the basic ideals of socialism. He’s always seemed a decent cove who would pay a fair wage for a day’s work and expect it in return.

I’m sure he pays his taxes and would want them used for services benefitting the greatest many. I’m almost certain he wouldn’t deny healthcare on the grounds of inability to pay or impart the benefits of his wisdom and education exclusively to those willing to pay the highest price.

And I’m damned sure he wouldn’t be allowing the UK’s biggest city to become the international centre of money-laundering and tax evasion which it now is or to embark on costly and imprudent foreign military adventures for the purposes of increasing the share value of a few anointed arms dealers, oil speculators and construction magnates.

As he well knows there is a fundamental difference between unfettered capitalism and the desire for a reasonable rate of return. In the quest for the first anything and everybody is worth sacrificing; to achieve the second you can be innovative and strong but still pay heed to human dignity, compassion, generosity, kindness and fairness.

The story of capitalism in the UK is bereft of any of these and consequently we have record numbers visiting food banks and 250,000 children living in poverty. Capitalism has failed them.

Socialism won’t automatically make life better for them but it will provide them with a level playing field. This is all we ask for and the thirst for it has yet to peak.