The young think they’re Marxists, but they’re super-consumers really

The PM is clinging to the old corporate order that a new capitalism will leave in the dust

reckoning. Mrs May and her very small team are not just on the wrong side of the argument about leaving the European Union, they are setting their faces against history and against the tumultuous changes in global economics which they do not pretend to address.

That brings us to the larger scene, where Brexit negotiations merge into the great contest over the future of our politics after we finally extricate ourselves from the EU. In all the argy-bargy about the parochial details of borders and trade agreements, much too little attention has been paid to what may be the most momentous development of our times. Capitalism, in its inimitable way, is evolving before our eyes into a quite different phase: over the 20th century, it was a story of corporate power blocs that had congealed into invincible world domination.

This is the reality with which the EU is accustomed to dealing. It remains the most significant influence on the policy-making institutions of those nations and international organisations who believe they run the world, our own dear Treasury among them. Mrs May’s bizarre adherence to the protectionist diktats of the EU is entirely attributable to the orthodoxy of the old capitalism. What is happening in the wider world is scarcely being addressed within the self-regarding councils of Europe or in the higher reaches of the Tory party.

This is what the clamour for Mrs May to espouse true free-market principles should be about. It is not simply a case of her mouthing centre-Left platitudes for electorally opportunistic reasons – although that is certainly a fatal mistake. More important is that she is failing to grasp a stupendous opportunity to embrace the stunning future that is now upon us: the generational shift in attitudes toward economic freedom, social fluidity and unprecedented choice. The next vital stage of economic growth is going to take place (indeed, is already taking place) not in the moribund old corporate sector but in the new innovative, entrepreneurial technologies which rely on individual inventiveness, flexible finance and a myriad of as yet unimagined development paths.

The emerging economies of Asia, China and the Pacific Rim are in a near-perfect position to engage in this new game, unhindered as they are by a century’s worth of vested interests and the entrenched governmental agencies that exist to serve them. The EU, in its present unreformed state, is doomed not just because of the problems of which we are already aware: its failure to appreciate the consequences of a post-industrial era where manufacture (and even the management of it) will be done largely by robots and such working class livelihoods as there are will be denied to indigenous populations by an infinite supply of migrant labour.

Yes, those are the familiar troubles with which the elephantine EU bureaucracy is failing to deal. But the bigger dilemma – so big that it is beyond the scope of unwieldy European parliaments, and vainglorious European officials – is that their whole model of a market economy is out of date. The shift toward individuality both in the new creative enterprises and the modern consumers they hope to serve is the irresistible force in this dynamic. It is behind the collapse of the old-fashioned retail sector and the phenomenal rise of tech innovation

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Taking a break from writing this column, I turned on the television and was immediately confronted with an advertisement for a mobile phone provider with the pitch: “Customise your phone plan to be as individual as you are.” This message is aimed primarily at the young, many of whom think they are on the communist Left – in spite of the fact that they would scarcely recognise a world in which they did not have a stupefying choice of broadband suppliers, mobile phones (and the contracts that go with them), television internet services with their competing offers of films and box sets, and electronic devices whose programs proliferate too quickly for the average human brain to comprehend.

The comic irony of this is almost too obvious: whole swathes of a generation who are, in real life, super-consumers with a sophisticated grasp of bargaining power that their parents envy, are advocating a return to monopoly services under state control. Perhaps somebody in the Conservative leadership will have the wit to point this out instead of busily plagiarising Labour’s anti-business, anti-competition rhetoric.

These new model free markets in tandem with free trade will be the essential keys to the new world order. If Europe (and the West generally) cannot embrace them – if they retreat to their over-regulated protectionist bunker – they will be left in the dust by the tiger economies of the East who will take over their position of world dominance just as they are already taking their clever, well-informed domestic customers – some of whom appear to think they are Marxists.

‘What is happening in the wider world is scarcely being addressed within the higher reaches of the Tory party’