OF ALL our avian fellow-creatures, vultures are among the least admired: we see a dark and menacing bird waiting for its supper as it hovers over a dying animal. They probably deserve a spirited defence of their contribution to the ecosphere to counter the instinctive dislike that they face.

To be fair, at least vultures wait for death to provide their supper. The capitalism described by Grace Blakeley does far worse; the features highlighted in the subtitle go well beyond vulturism, and in 300 pages of trenchant critique — with additional pages of notes and citations — readers are left in no doubt about how governments, bankers, and boardroom executives manipulate the economy to their advantage.

Her thesis is that the crises in the national and global economy are not accidental if regrettable by-products of distortions in the system, but, rather, indications that the system is generally producing its intended outcomes. For all the language of “free markets”, we inhabit an economy highly planned by those with financial power, aided by their friends and allies in the political sphere.

There are, indeed, cracks in the system, but they just reveal its purposes and aims: the cracks are where the light gets in. Like David Jenkins’s Market Whys and Human Wherefores, Blakeley draws largely on press accounts: those running the economy are remarkably unguarded about what they were doing and why.

What happened after the Boeing 737 MAX crash of October 2018 revealed the compromises with safety that Boeing, primarily concerned with its own profits, had made. All this is described in detail in the first chapter; the second details the long-running saga of Ford’s relationship with organised labour. After these two chapters, Blakeley has collected under the heading “disaster capitalism” accounts of how crises as varied as the covid pandemic and the collapse of the housing market were all turned to companies’ advantage in the form of preferential loans and bailouts obtained through the cosy relationship between government and corporate elites.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the second part of the book, describing the lengths to which the corporate world will go to protect its interests, begins with Amazon, casting Jeff Bezos as the modern-day Henry Ford, in his efforts to prevent workers’ organising. The author unmasks the deception behind talk of a “free market”; much of it is carefully planned by the executives of companies and banks, in cahoots with government, to their mutual advantage.

Blakeley offers a strong, well-researched, and passionately argued exposé of the capitalist world, its fallacious claims to offer “freedom”, and the interests of those who are planning it in their own interests. She doesn’t — and doesn’t claim to — present both sides of the argument; and her anecdotal approach is far removed from, say, Piketty’s weighty macroeconomic — and much harder to grasp — analysis of the disproportionate power and wealth of the asset-owners who dominate the world economy.

Blakeley is, however, on the same wavelength, shining a light on the workings of a system that passes unquestioned as political parties prefer to deal with issues that do not threaten the kind of fundamental change which her concluding chapters urge. Hers is a shout to “take back control”, not at the periphery, but in the way that the socialist tradition out of which she speaks called for again and again: those who work and produce and invent and labour are due both the predominant say in the direction of their enterprise and a just reward for their labours.

Many reading this book will doubt the political possibility of achieving that new world; they may also have the uncomfortable sense of the threat that it would pose to their current lifestyle choices. But they will surely have to agree that they have been presented here with a vigorous and persuasive account of how their present world works, and that whether to question or continue to accept it is their choice to make.

The Rt Revd Dr Peter Selby is an Honorary Visiting Professor in Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College, London. He is a former Bishop of Worcester.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate crimes, backdoor bailouts and the death of freedom
Grace Blakeley
Bloomsbury £20
(978-1-5266-3807-6)
Church Times Bookshop £18