Labour's challenge: to rescue capitalism from its own arrogance

Elites have lost the healthy fear once provided by 'the communist spectre' and now capitalist excess is going unchecked

A few weeks ago a Letters to the Editor contributor from Hertfordshire suggested that since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, global society's elites have lost the "healthy sense of fear" they felt towards their fellow citizens for 200 years after the French Revolution. They would be wise, he wrote, to recover it before angry peasants burn down their chateaux again.

It's an unremarkable sentiment, though less frequently aired than it should be in these unequal times, when tax-dodging corporate executives and reckless bankers are so publicly brazen in their defence of malpractices that cheat customer, taxpayer and shareholder. Just watch a few sessions of evidence to the Commons public accounts committee on BBC Parliament if you still need convincing.

Related: The end of capitalism has begun