THE mainstream media is very poor at providing historical context to events, perhaps particularly in the age of “breaking” and 24-hour news.

The liquidation of Carillion in mid-January was not a great deal different.

ITV pundit Robert Peston did tweet that the end of Carillion also meant the end of the 25-year Tory and Labour government love affair with PFI — partnerships where privateers made the profits and, when they didn’t, the public picked up the costs of the risk.

I’m not so sure Theresa May agrees, but to his credit Jeremy Corbyn was clear that PFI was a model that had never been fit for purpose — and after Carillion it never will be.

This is the entry point for providing a useful historical context to matters.

Social media commentators have pointed out that were it not for Labour’s left turn under Corbyn it would not have been the principle of PFI that was questioned but simply the detail of what had happened with Carillion. 

That is important and the point that it was in effect a giant ponzi scheme — raising funds on false pretences.

The real issue is not Carillion but that the whole free market private sector is rotten. 

Carillion is not an isolated example of something that got out of hand, rather it is symptomatic of how capitalism has worked since the post-1945 Keynesianism of the welfare state was abandoned in the early 1970s, and certainly by the time of the 1974 oil crisis.

It was at this point that Labour became committed not to public spending and public services but to cuts, in order to meet the requirements of the IMF to provide a loan to bail out British capitalism.

We have been there several times since, not least in 2008, and until the ascendancy of Corbyn in 2015 there was a sort of competition between Labour and the Tories to see who could whack the poor most efficiently while maintaining the well-off in the manner to which they were accustomed.

Perhaps the first sign of how things would develop was the Lonhro scandal in 1973. 

Initially a mining company, Lonhro had expanded, in much the same way Carillion did, to have a finger in many pies. There was a dispute between the head of the company and some of its directors about the stewardship of affairs which ended in the High Court. 

Tiny Rowland, the chief executive, won but the whole episode threw into public light the murky side of how free market capitalism had developed.

Tory prime minister Edward Heath labelled Lonhro “the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism” in Parliament. Little of course was actually done.

Hence with the demise of British Home Stores after mismanagement, workers were left in the lurch over their pensions. The matter is still being unravelled in the courts. Carillion is but the latest in the list.

A key issue is whether capitalism is a moral system. Adam Smith certainly saw it as being one, although the nuances he built into that view, the hidden hand of capital, have long been lost on the current generation of privateers. Their view is that the free market and profit, where it is made, are a moral good, full stop.

There is another view, the moral economy which EP Thompson identified as operating in the 18th century. It was not in any way socialist but it did take the view that people being able to live with a decent income was as important as profit, and crowd action and protests took place to reinforce the point.

Perhaps the 18th century has something to teach the 21st.