Bernard Ingham: Why unbridled capitalism is taking all of us for a ride

ONE of the most depressing and alarming letters has just landed on my doormat. No, it it's not about my health; it's about my brass.
Can Theresa May deliver responsible capitalism?Can Theresa May deliver responsible capitalism?
Can Theresa May deliver responsible capitalism?

It follows my reporting about three months ago that Canada Life was proposing to charge me £1,290 a year for managing the £6,000 or so left in the fund from a £50,000 bond I took out in 2000 – and 6.25 per cent a day above base rate if the fund under their control went into debt.

Having castigated them for their grasping greed, it turns out that they do not seem to have done much wrong since, I must presume, my financial adviser told me back in 2000 that the management charge would be around £1,200 a year.

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It doesn’t sound too bad on £50,000, though that is more than two per cent. But on £6,000?

At any rate, as a token of “goodwill”, they have found a way of putting £2,864.70 into my fund by way of “compensation”, presumably to smooth my ruffled feathers.

So why do I find the letter depressing and alarming?

Simply because I wonder how many individuals, who do not have “journalist and political bothermaker” written all over them as presumably I do, are being taken for a ride by the financial 
industry?

Just how much is the small print being used to milk them of savings far harder won than mine?

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This is where the money men in Britain are running into real trouble.

If they could spare time from trying to make Brexit the disaster they forecast, they would discover in the mess into which British politics has fallen signs of a political consensus against their excesses.

It is not just Jeremy Corbyn and “oily” Owen Smith – as he is called in his Pontypridd constituency “because he never gives a straight answer” – who are proposing workers on company boards; so is the Prime Minister, Theresa May, as a condition for getting government contracts.

It is neither here nor there that I regard worker directors as mere tokenism or, alternatively, a wrecking move by Corbyn’s class-war militants.

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Politicians across the spectrum are getting fed up with unbridled capitalism and the failure of a seeming multitude of regulatory bodies to control its abuses.

Responsible City men should be making the point to every nook and cranny of the financial industry that they had better start behaving more responsibly – and soon – or else they might find the Corbynistas tying them up in every knot they learned in the Boy Scouts.

But it is not just the City but both industry and commerce that employ every wile to part the consumer from his money to maximise their profits.

With notable exceptions, most of them are now, post-Brexit, talking down the economy.

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Not a day goes by but some firm or organisation attributes some marginal decline to Brexit to convince us that what is happening is exactly what they forecast would occur.

But in the clothing industry, for example, any shortfall could just as easily have been caused by the wet rather than the flaming June that the Met Office foolishly forecast.

I have the most serious doubts whether the Bank of England should have halved interest rates to a record 0.25 per cent and printed oodles of cash in the bargain by way of more quantitative easing. It 
just encourages the moaning “Remainers”.

More importantly, surely by utterly destroying any incentive to save and encouraging people to spend, spend, spend – and banks to lend, lend, lend – while debauching the currency, they are stoking up trouble that will owe nothing to Brexit but everything to official stupidity.

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Corbyn and Smith seem to have been joined by Governor Mark Carney in competing for the deepest dive into debt.

Where is there any convincing evidence that a relatively booming economy is on the slide post-Brexit when, far from having cut our ties with the EU, we are still bound hand and foot to it?

We could more easily make out a case that our continued subservience to the EU is a drag on the economy since Continental Europe’s economy is very sluggish indeed.

By now, you will have concluded that I am thoroughly brassed off with the exploitation of the ordinary consumer and the sheer, destructive negativism of whole swathes of our commercial society and its entirely unreliable economic forecasters.

I fervently hope that out of the current turmoil Theresa May engineers a more responsible capitalism. If not, it will deserve a pox on all its houses.