Cameron: We'll stand up to the corporations
Friday, 30 January 2009 6:02 PM
By Ian Dunt
David Cameron has used his speech to the Davos summit to tell his audience the Conservatives will stand up to large corporations if he attains power.
"It's time to help create vibrant, local economies - even if that means standing in the way of the global corporate juggernauts," the Tory leader said.
In a decidedly left-of-centre speech, Mr Cameron nevertheless specified how politicians and businessmen can save the capitalist system and restrict fiscal stimuli.
"A lot of people are angry with capitalism," he said.
"Instead of representing hope for a better future, they think capitalism threatens it. So if we want capitalism to be a success again, we need to make capitalism popular again."
Mr Cameron cited the lack of a tangible moral centre to the capitalist system as the reason the public appear to be turning against it.
"People might not follow the minutiae of over-leveraging or short-selling, but they know that the roots of our current crisis lie in recklessness and greed," he said.
There are even sections of the speech in which the Conservative leader appeared to dabble in Marxism, with certain arguments carrying strong echoes of the Marxist theory of alienation.
"Someone working in the local branch of a global corporation can feel like little more than flotsam in some vast international sea of business," he said, "their destiny decided by someone else, somewhere else, as globalisation can turn into monopolisation, sweeping aside the small, personal, local competition in our neighbourhoods."
He also reserved some concern for the basic inequality of the current global economic model, saying: "Too often, the winners have taken it all. Today, the poorest half of the world's population own less than one per cent of the world's wealth. We've got a lot of capital but not many capitalists, and people rightly think that isn't fair."
The speech, while constructed around arguments to save capitalism as "the best way to increase human wealth, health and happiness", is far to the left of what most Conservative leaders would have been comfortable saying.
His decision to make the speech at the Davos summit, where some of the world's top businessmen mix with the rich and powerful from around the world confirms a curious tendency in the Cameron camp of making speeches in locations where there will be little support for them.
The most memorable previous example of this was his speech on responsibility, made at the early stages of a by-election campaign in Glasgow East.
During that intervention, Mr Cameron told an audience in one of the most deprived constituencies in the UK that the overweight and the poor had to take responsibility for their actions rather than blame their circumstance.
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