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In the depths of the worst recession for decades (thanks, Gordon!), a retail company – one of the hardest hit sectors of all – recently announced its employees are set to share a £140 million bonus pot, equivalent to eight weeks pay each, and are set to announce strong full year results. What is the name of this remarkable company that has managed to make money in such difficult conditions, when other retailers are going under? The John Lewis Partnership.

The unusual thing about this company? It is a workers co-operative. All 68,000 staff are motivated to work well and efficiently, knowing their performance and ideas will have a direct result on John Lewis profits, and with it their own bonus payments. This is what capitalism should be all about – workers owning the company they work for, making and sharing the profits, rather than handing them over to remote share-holders who may pull out at any time and destroy the livelihoods of many people, if they get the chance of slightly more profit elsewhere.

Now, profit is a reasonable motive to invest money – without the profit motive, there is little point in starting a business in the first place. The problems arise when people who do not have a direct, intimate connection with the business are the ones who own it. The global capitalist elites would have us believe that their great wealth makes them the natural choice to own businesses – an “Officer” class, if you like -  while we should be content playing the part of cannon fodder in the war that is commerce.

It is high time the English people woke up and realised these “elites” and the “Free Market” (the option to close a factory in England and use slave labour in the Far East) will be the economic death of us. The only people who care about us, is us. 

The John Lewis model is surely the way forward in these difficult times: virtually any company would run more efficiently if the employees were the owners, actively implementing efficiencies and new ideas, unlike the present situation at shareholder owned businesses where the workforce merely turn up for work and perform like robots, doing only what they are told, and no more. There is no outlet for creativity in such an environment, which leads to frustration and apathy – not a good recipe for productivity, I think you'll agree. 

And imagine how different things would be at the Corus steelworks in Teeside, or the Cadbury plants around the country, if these enterprises were owned by the workers themselves, and could not be bought off like the original shareholders were? They would still be in business, making things, producing wealth for England, instead of wondering how long their redundancy pay will last. 

The English Radicals believe that global capitalism has failed England, we see in this country and elsewhere how production and wealth is shifting eastwards, leaving us without work and income: we also believe socialism is wrong, as State ownership of all property and means of production is a dictatorship, and ultimately doomed to collapse, even as it did in Russia. We ask people to consider Distributism, a system that promotes business ownership, not by the idle rich or the State, but by the workforce - as co-operatives. Staying with the rotating system of capitalism and socialism guarantees a bleak future either of poverty or slavery.

Don't we and our children all deserve better than that?

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