Let me be blunt: the recent surge in employee ownership among British firms is less a triumph of socialism and more a survival instinct against the creeping corporatisation of our age. When a business owner like John Lewis’s progeny sells to his staff, he is not embracing leftist utopianism; he is fleeing the sterile grip of faceless shareholders. The Victorian mill owners knew that loyalty and productivity sprang from stewardship, not dividends.
Today’s owner-managers, battered by quarterly reports and private equity vultures, are rediscovering this truth. They realise that a worker who holds a stake will patch a leaky roof at midnight, while a hired manager calls for a contractor. Employee ownership is a return to the medieval guild, the yeoman farmer, the proud craft.
It is a hedge against the enervation of our national character, a rebellion against the bureaucratic torpor that has paralysed our industries. The naysayers call it economic Luddism, but I call it common sense. If we wish to revive British manufacturing and spirit, we must hand the keys to those who actually turn the wheels.
This is not charity; this is strategy. Thus, the ‘John Lewis model’ is not a quaint experiment but a blueprint for national renewal. Will our mandarins in Westminster notice?
Probably not. They are still trying to remember which century we are in.
