Unlike the jubilant Polly Toynbee, we are not convinced that David Cameron’s recent pronouncements on big business and the redistribution of wealth quite amount to a repudiation of capitalism, nor even, as she puts it, that the Conservative leader has ‘put a stake through Mrs Thatcher’s legacy’. Mr Cameron has yet to announce any firm policy at all, and it is a fair bet that when he does so it will not involve nationalisation of the means of production nor lead to droves of big businessmen being led off to jail on charges of ‘corporate irresponsibility’.
But when the time does come to prepare the next Conservative manifesto there is one big business which will need to be tackled, involving an admission of an earlier misjudgment by the Tories. It did not require this week’s average fare increases of 4.5 per cent to reaffirm the impression that rail privatisation has been far from the success of the earlier privatisations.
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