This time of year is always schizophrenic.
It is a shopping frenzy in which many businesses aim to make their biggest profits, yet also a few days when we are invited to step back from the hurly-burly and reflect on the true values of life: the non-commercial ones.
Scrooge, the embodiment of the anti-festive spirit, is the archetypal heartless, soulless businessman, a merchant and money-lender.
Yet Britain has a far richer and more positive tradition. The Victorian era produced remarkable enlightened capitalists whose legacy still shapes our society today.
Over Christmas we will still be eating Cadbury chocolates, now US-owned, but founded by a Quaker family. Many of us using our Barclaycards for festive shopping may be unaware the bank was also founded by Quakers.
In Dickens’ and John Cadbury’s day, society was in upheaval, with rapid technological advance alongside sharp inequality. Plus ça change. Those enlightened capitalists believed it was their responsibility to lead social reform, to care for their workers’ welfare and to articulate a moral vision of how business should serve society. They saw that the performance of their companies depended on a strong community.
Bah humbug: Scrooge, the embodiment of the anti-festive spirit, is the archetypal heartless, soulless businessman
Unlike some contemporary versions of ESG (environmental, social and governance) this was not virtue-signalling or incidental do-gooding. It was integral to the business itself, running through its veins.
Today’s business leaders and the politicians who shape the environment in which companies operate face ethical questions just as urgent, particularly around their responsibilities to workers. The coming year is likely to be pivotal for AI, not merely in terms of whether shares in the sector are in bubble territory, but because adoption is racing ahead of regulation and any settled ethical framework.
AI poses profound questions about the future of work and workers, as it seems likely to replace many jobs currently done by humans. In the past, technological change has ultimately created more employment, not less, but the transition can be brutal.
How business and society manage that transition is one of the great questions of our time. The fact that nearly one million young people are now classed as NEETs – not in education, employment or training – is a serious moral challenge for employers and politicians alike. Alan Milburn, leading an independent investigation into the issue, should be seeking out practical, proven approaches from business leaders who have already been tackling NEETs successfully off their own bat.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is, on the one hand, expressing grave concern about the number of NEETs, while on the other hand making it more expensive and risky to hire young people. Any measures to raise direct or indirect employment taxes should in future be explicitly screened for their impact on under-25s. Government should also introduce skills tax relief to incentivise employers to take on apprentices.
The future of work is up for debate and the social contract between employers and employees is being renegotiated. Yet this government risks giving the impression it thinks in simplistic binaries – slurring individuals and firms as ‘undeserving’ to justify tax raids to fund welfare and public-sector pay rises. The world is not so simple. It is not saintly NHS workers versus evil profit-seekers, as the resident doctors’ strike, cynically staged over Christmas, makes painfully clear.
Christmas is meant to be a season of moral reckoning. We don’t need crude socialism but enlightened capitalism.
Without that, we will get neither prosperity nor social justice – just more Scrooges, and fewer Cadburys.
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