Hardcore Brexiters are pushing to turn the UK into "Singapore-on-Thames".

82% of the Singapore population live in social housing on subsidised 99-year leases. Shall we try that then? A massive expansion in council house construction? What's that? No?? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

As a leftie what I sometimes hear is: "communism is a fine idea in principle; but we tried it, in practice, and it doesn't work." Well I'm here, ex cathedra as Professor 19th-c Literature and Culture to tell you: pal, we tried full capitalism and it absolutely does not work.

We tried it in the UK from the middle of the 18th-century (and especially from the new poor laws of the 1830s) through to the Liberal government introduction of reforms in the early 1900s. It made a tiny fraction prodigiously wealthy and it impoverished or starved the majority.

In the 20th-c we (in the west) experimented with finding the balance between social security and permitting capitalist wealth-seeking. But the hardcore Brexiter dream is to abolish the social security part altogether. This is a deeply, deeply bad idea.

You know what the late 18th-century to the early 20th-century was? The Age of Violent Revolutions. When a system disenfranchises, oppresses & starves a majority of its population bloody revolution becomes not only likely but inevitable. I'd suggest we not go back to that.

Even Thatcher understood that her ideology required a balance between capitalism and social security. Me, I'd suggest her idea of the balance was weighted too far to the former, but it was still a balance. The Johnsonian-Farageist future doesn't want the balance at all.

The most irksome thing is people of my and my parents' generations who enjoyed the manifold benefits of the capitalism/social-security balance & who've convinced themselves that their present-day prosperity is entirely self-authored. I'm-Alright-Jackism of the most toxic kind.