Socialism, a word we have all heard thrown around as an insulting, fearful anecdote in politics, the economy and even our family dinners. Socialism is defined by the Oxford Dictionary:

n. 1 political and economic theory advocating State ownership and control of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.

Which as a fundamental idea, doesn’t sound bad or something to be fearful of unless you are Jeff Bezos, and even in that case it still doesn’t mean that your ‘hard-earned’ wealth will be stripped away, it just means that a small part of it will be redistributed fairly – to benefit everyone.

Anti-lockdown

Recently in London, a couple of dozen anti-lockdown protesters gathered to protect their right to not wear a mask, while conducting something that could be considered as bio-terrorism. Something that they also agree on, except for carelessly spreading a deadly virus, is that Boris Johnson is a socialist!

Yes, Boris Johnson, our Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative party was deemed a socialist. The Conservative party over the last 10 years has continuously displayed its most ‘right-wing’ façade, so to call Boris Johnson a socialist is, at the very least, laughable. Although this incident reinforces just how much socialism is misunderstood and looked down upon.

People tend to mention socialism so much but without contextualizing it, so let’s analyse what the ‘phantom of socialism’ actually is.

Norway

Currently there are no countries that embody socialism in its true form. Norway is one of the only countries currently that has adapted some features of socialism like a large-scale nationalisation of former privately owned sectors. Norway also has some of the highest living standards, lowest unemployment rates and highest purchasing power. it is citizens are also some of the happiest in the world.

It’s a form of a socialist model that is highly functional. So socialism is constantly being proven successful but yet in the UK, we are so far swayed to the right that even centrist Labour Party politics seem radical to the public; for example Kier Starmer the current leader of the opposition is closer to centrist views rather than left-wing politics. However one of the ‘red-sheep’ of socialism we have had in the UK is Jeremy Corbyn. He was one of the few self-identifying socialist politicians in the UK and of course he was, from the start, scrutinised for that. One of his ‘radical-left’ policies was to modestly raise taxes, on those earning over £80,000, in an attempt to fund other sectors like education.

Lastly I would like to discuss just how much education could potentially benefit from the fruits of the socialist tree. After Tony Blair’s attempts to socialise the education sector his successors flushed that down the drain. We can see a large attempt to further push the marketisation of education, making schools and universities more business-like through schemes like ‘parental choice’, ‘academies’ and ‘free schools’ tremendously failing to bridge the divide between social classes.

Education

So let’s unravel how socialism would benefit the education sector. Firstly, we would be looking at the nationalisation of higher education which simply means free university. The short-term individual benefits are that more working class students can have a chance of studying the course they want without having to worry about paying their student loans until they are of the age to send their offspring to university.

Nevertheless the nation-wide benefits of free higher education is that we have a more competitive workforce that we can benefit from without the need to headhunt employees, from other countries, for high-stake positions. Eventually that would lower our unemployment rates and allow for more wealth and intellect to flow within the country.

Socialism has long been entrenched in the UK’s ‘bad-books’ because the wealthy just want to preserve their wealth echoing the message that there is no more room at ‘the top’. The truth is, that socialism can be a very prosperous system if we actually give it a chance and stop making it out to be a phantom of a dystopian reality.