The Ethical Capitalist by Julian Richer

Author:Julian Richer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

CHAPTER 5

CAPITALISM AND THE COMMUNITY

PAYING TAXES

IN AN INTERVIEW with Women’s Own magazine in 1987, the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher outlined what she felt the relationship between the individual and the community to be. ‘There’s no such thing as society,’ she said. ‘There are individual men and women and there are families.’

For many of us around then, Thatcher’s controversial comment came to symbolise the individualistic spirit of the 1980s: people are successful through their own hard work, the mood seemed to suggest; they shouldn’t feel any obligation to the people around them. Today this kind of ‘me first’ attitude seems to be even more deeply embedded. Take the title of a recent article published by the American business magazine Inc: ‘Why Selfishness Is a Virtue’.

But Margaret Thatcher was wrong. There is such a thing as society. We all need people around us who can provide the support and services that make everyday life possible – we all benefit from a complex web of social relationships that extends far beyond our families and friends. Even the supposedly narrow world of business, with its focus on profitability and the bottom line, relies heavily on the community. It may look to individuals for its customers, but it needs society as a whole to provide its employees and to create and maintain the infrastructure without which it cannot possibly survive. Business people who say that they’ve succeeded completely on their own can only ever be right up to a point. They may have created their venture from scratch, or have taken an existing one and built it up, but those enterprises will be deeply dependent on the community and cannot flourish without it.

When that community infrastructure isn’t there or doesn’t work as well as it might, it’s businesses who are among the first to notice and to complain. To take just a single example: one contributory factor to Britain’s disappointing productivity record (which I outlined briefly in Chapter 4) is its poor broadband service, which is reckoned by many to be among the worst in Europe. Successive governments have hoped that individual broadband providers would take up the slack, but it’s clear that the investment required is far greater than those providers are prepared to put in. There are direct business consequences, and business looks to the wider community to help fund the service via the taxes it pays. In 2017 the government therefore made some funds available in the form of a share of the £500 million it committed to the technology sector in its latest National Productivity Investment Fund review. It’s clearly nothing like enough, but it shows an acceptance of the principle that broadband has now become so central to the effective functioning of both individual businesses and the broader economy that government has to play its part in building and maintaining it.

In longer-established parts of the country’s physical infrastructure this community involvement is, of course, taken for granted. Transport demonstrates this particularly clearly. Although, historically, many roads were privately built

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