Worship the rich, neglect the poor? Adam Smith’s words still capture how power works

theguardian.com:

If you want to see how class and power operate in Britain today, look at the different ways in which “regulation” is applied to working-class people and businesses. In the one case, it is about imposing ever-tighter restrictions, making it increasingly difficult for workers to take action to defend their interests if in doing so they might damage the interests of business. In the other case, regulation involves removing as many restrictions as possible even when doing so hurts the interests of ordinary people, and in the most monstrous fashion imaginable.

On Thursday, the government signed off on a new law allowing businesses to employ agency staff to replace strikers – in essence, state-sanctioned strike breaking. “This was a criminal offence. Now it’s an option for business,” tweeted business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, perhaps letting slip more than he intended about this government’s approach.

The law is a response to the rail strikes of last month, and to the looming “summer of discontent”, as many workers, having faced a decade of wage stagnation, and looking at a rate of inflation now approaching double digits, have decided that more real-term pay cuts are unacceptable.

It is also the latest in a 50-year-long crusade, from the 1971 Industrial Relations Act onwards, to neuter trade unions, make strikes as difficult as possible, outlaw most forms of solidarity, such as secondary picketing, and give businesses the greatest possible scope, not just to prevent and break strikes but also to sack workers and unilaterally change their conditions of work.

This is not the first time that the government has tried to introduce such a strike-breaking law. The 2015 Conservative party manifesto pledged to “repeal nonsensical