If you haven't read Owen Jones' book 'The Establishment' then I strongly recommend that you do. Peter Wilby of The New Stateman said of it 'As Jones shows British capitalism is highly dependent on state largesse and rich corporations are the biggest scroungers of all. Below a sample of his writing:-
And then there is the mother of all subsidies: the British government's bailing out of the banks in 2008. Privately owned businesses had been responsible for plunging themselves, along with much of the world into economic ruin; now, those same businesses fully expected the taxpayer to pick up the bill. Nowhere was this more the case than in Britain where the government used over a trillion pounds of public money to bail out the banks. Britain was left with a financial system on a state-fuelled life-support machine - one on which private business is completely dependent.
The 'free-market' cherished by the Establishment is, then, based on a fantasy. It might be argued that socialism flourishes in modern Britain, but it is a socialism for the rich and for corporations. The state is there to support them, to rescue them if needs be. Much of the rest of the population, on the other hand, is increasingly expected to sink or swim: their experience of capitalism, red in tooth and claw.
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