The man who sits across from me on the red leather couch speaks in a Scouse drawl usually heard among the ranks of the Labour Party, not the chiselled Oxbridge accents of the Tory elite, and he has a louche, rumpled appearance that seems more polytechnic than ruling class.
But it is when Phillip Blond speaks that his novelty is most apparent.
“Free-market neoliberalism has created a tiny elite and turned the working class into losers with no power to control their lives – what they call the free market is actually covert capture by monopolies,” he tells me, followed by: “Monopoly capitalism has atomized us into a society of lonely consumers isolated from a big, monolithic, uncaring state.”
We are, he says, “living in a modern-day version of serfdom, where the working classes and even the middle classes are living in dependency to the banks.”
He wants to break up the banks into hundreds of local community-based enterprises. He wants to break up the government and large enterprises into worker-owned co-operatives.
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