Corybn's Crumbs of Comfort. Lord Desai's Retort. Cooking The Books September 2025.

Creating an egalitarian society through a redistribution of wealth within capitalism is a pipe-dream as it goes against the logic of the system. Capitalism is based on a minority owning the means of wealth production and on these being used to generate profits that are accumulated as more wealth for the owners. Inequality of wealth ownership and the tendency for the wealthy to get wealthier are built into the system.

Attempting to counter this will mean that the new party will end up being a mere party of protest, spending its time criticising the government for not doing what it ‘demands’ and ‘resisting’ when the workings of the capitalist economy force the government to make things worse.

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The Times’s obituary (4 August) of the economist Lord Desai who died at the end of July recounted the following anecdote: