I’m beginning to feel like Benjamin the Donkey in Animal Farm. Benjamin lived so long, the world turned him cynical. He knew that whether the pigs ruled, or the humans, life would always be bloody awful on Manor Farm.

Having lived through the dawn of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, and watched our economic model shift from a system which at least attempted a modicum of social fairness to one designed to reward only greed, my view of capitalism is today roughly proportionate with my view of gangsterism.

Rather I should modify that last sentence to read: "My view of the current iteration of capitalism."

Capitalism, as we currently experience it, is not what its founders intended. Capitalism does not have to work this way.

The notion of a world without markets is absurd. Humans are commercial creatures. But the market need not be monstrous.

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The market can – and should – be regulated so that everyone can make a buck (including big bucks), but nobody gets ground into dust by the most rapaciously immoral amongst us.

Indeed, the current iteration of capitalism reminds me of the Copacabana scene in Goodfellas.

Martin Scorsese’s movie depicts the New York mafia taking over the Copacabana nightclub. After they suck the place dry, strip-mining it for their luxury lifestyles, they torch it.

Tennyson wrote of nature being "red in tooth and claw". Well, what we see at the Copacabana is vampire capitalism at its most Tennysonian.

Who of us today hasn’t experienced vampire capitalism? My home town in the mid-80s was destroyed when the local factory was shut down by the bosses.

It closed not because it wasn’t profitable. It was. It just wasn’t making "enough" profit to........

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