Why business could prosper under a Corbyn government
While the Daily Mail, with Pavlovian regularity, persists in ringing the "Marxist" alarm bell, the Financial Times is a little more measured. "Labour has a fair wind" with business leaders, the paper argued this month, "with many terrified of a hard Brexit". At the CBI's annual conference in November, leaders of industry gave Jeremy Corbyn a distinctly warmer welcome than they gave Theresa May.
That should come as no surprise, given the destabilising extremism of the Conservative Brexiters. Their echoing of hard-right American Republican ideology and advocacy of a hard Brexit is based on the belief that the UK's economic interests, in particular the NHS and public services, would benefit from subjugation to American oligopolistic capital. Hence the calls for the UK to join the North American Free Trade Agreement. Yet, at the same time, polling shows that the British people are disillusioned with the privatisation of key sectors, and favour nationalisation. They seek protection from the impact of deregulated market forces on their lives and livelihoods and on their children's prospects.
From 1956 to 2008, Conservative governments had an average annual surplus of 0.3% of GDP, while Labour's was 1.1%
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