Willy Hutton is starting to parody himself

Will Hutton's managed to argue himself into a most interesting little corner. He's been shouting for years that we need companies to be managed for the long term, not just for the short term interests of share traders. OK, not an argument we share (for the price of a share is the net present value of all future income, therefore it is a long term matter) but interesting in a manner. Hutton's also one who shouts about how appalling all this inequality is. And the rich shouldn't be allowed to own everything and other such generally lefty ideas. And then we get to this:

In fairness, part of Tesco’s problem is that Britain’s retailing landscape is being transformed by two different challenges – online shopping and discount retailers Aldi and Lidl, whose market share has doubled in the past five years to more than 10%. Tesco’s grandiose out-of-town hypermarkets are now stranded behemoths no longer attracting, as they once did, shoppers who now prefer to go online. Tesco has recognised the reality, stopped building new stores, closed others and written down the value of its fixed assets by £4.7bn.

But Aldi’s and Lidl’s success is rooted in something more profound than just capitalising on newly cost-conscious, financially pressed consumers. They are privately owned businesses that think long term and whose business purpose, enshrined by the owners, is to focus on a very narrow range of goods they can sell at high volumes and thus price incredibly keenly. British supermarkets, having to please shareholders with no such commitment, can never price so keenly even if they could match Aldi’s and Lidl’s logistical capacity and focus.

He's seriously arguing that it's better for everything to be owned by a few billionaires than it is for all of us, in a rather more minor manner, to be capitalists and owning the businesses of the country through our own savings and or pensions.

How on Earth did anyone nominally on the left end up advocating such oligarchic policies?