LATE-PHASE CAPITALISM AND THE WORKER: A PROMISE BROKEN

The majority of people feel a justifiable sense of self-worth in working for their living, and in being able to provide for themselves and their families, but the late-phase capitalist economic system that now prevails is sidelining an increasing number of people, particularly in Britain, from even the possibility of being able to provide fully for themselves and their families, no matter how hard they work. These workers are not “shirkers”: the are casualties of an increasingly savage and unjust economic system.

Temporary and part-time work (particularly in Britain’s flourishing gig economy) is becoming the norm for a growing number of workers. This is invariably work that barely earns the worker a living. With couples, it has become increasingly necessary for both parents to go to work, if they are to afford to raise a family. (And what harmful social consequences are we storing up for the future via this early-life absence of a mother’s constant love?) 

Feeding into these malign employment practices are the rocketing costs of renting a home in Britain. Thatcher’s plan to create a pseudo-middle class from the working class, via her right-to-buy scheme (a scheme which only recently is being re-examined by government in England, although the Scottish administration outlawed the scheme in 2016, and the administration in Wales did likewise in 2019), was for several decades highly successful in terms of her aim to create Conservative voters of erstwhile Labour voters. Historically, homeowners have been more likely to vote Conservative, and it is only with the rise of Reform UK that this link has very likely been broken.

However, not only are many times fewer workers able today (without access to the Bank of Mum and Dad, or Granny’s Bank) to buy a home of their own, but a decreasing number of people in work can afford even to rent a home suitable for raising a family. There has in fact been a rapid rise in Britain of outright homelessness. Over 382,000 people were recorded as homeless in England in 2025, an 8% increase from 2024. Of these, more than 350 000 were adults plus children, the majority in temporary housing or hostels. The implications down the line for society are – or should be – alarming. This increase in homeless figures, I would argue, is due primarily to rocketing rental costs. A parallel development has been the huge increase in foodbank usage, with the Trussel Trust reporting a 51% rise in five years.

And people wonder at the UK’s falling birth rate, with the fertility rate hitting a record low of 1.41 in 2024 in England and Wales, and 1.25 in Scotland. These figures stand in stark contrast against a necessary replacement fertility rate of 2.08. But if working full time no longer guarantees that you can raise a family, then a falling fertility rate is the obvious consequence.   

Late-phase capitalism in Britain (and in the US also) is an economic system celebrating unabashed greed. And unlike the form of capitalism that prevailed during the Victorian period, it is not accompanied by (and to an extent, modified by) philanthropy. Nor is it anything like the capitalism that prevailed between the end of the second world war and Thatcher’s accession to power in 1979, for in this form, the malign effects of capitalism for the poor were modified by a massive program of building council houses, and a welfare system which did not face the constant threat of cuts, and even (as we contemplate the possibility of a Reform UK government after the next general election) near-extinction. Late-phase capitalism is an economic system that offers the rich inordinately greater rewards for far less effort, than it ever offers the poor for their far greater efforts. Median pay for FTSE CEO’s in Britain in 2024 was more than 100 times a median worker’s pay, or 113:1, up from 79:1 in 2020. Such a huge pay differential is both socially and morally indefensible.  

Late-phase capitalism is increasingly failing to fulfill for workers the promise of their being able to get ahead by working hard. Such a promise, that held good between 1945 to the early 1980s, seems almost quaint today. If major civil unrest in the future, along with an increasing number of voters turning to extremist political parties, is to be prevented, then capitalism must be more tightly regulated, and some provision must be maintained for those who cannot survive under late-phase capitalism. We cannot look to private enterprise to self-regulate (any more than we could look to a great white shark to go on a self-imposed diet), or for private charities to assume the burden of welfare provision; this is merely to compound the problem. It seems to me that state intervention in the form of tighter business and financial regulation is fast becoming necessary, if a growing percentage of the population is not to be deprived even of the barest means of survival. 

If you cannot summon from within you some concern for the injustices being meted out to the poor (on the grounds that the poor will always be with us – Matthew 26:11), then find within you some concern for sustaining a stable UK society, within which your business and investments may flourish, and the fundamentals of a capitalist economic system may remain in place.