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Ashley Madison hacking: Cashing in on sleaze is not quite what Mrs T had in mind with her ‘entrepreneurial revolution’

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The hacking of the Ashley Madison adultery website – with the threat of 37million married love rats being exposed – is a cautionary tale in so many respects.

Firstly, its cheating subscribers - said to include an almost implausibly staggering 1.2million Britons – should have known better than to plan affairs, especially online.

Secondly, the website – without wishing to sound too much like a Mary Whitehouse-style probity crusader – should have known that cashing in on sleaze and families’ misery could massively backfire in a world full of expert web vandals.

But the really interesting part of this story is the suggestion that the hackers, who have demanded Ashley Madison is shut down or else they will release all the data, were also motivated by profit – rather than the moral highground.

An insider told Sky News that The Impact Team, who claim to be behind the hack, has no intention of exposing users - but instead wants the publicity in order to sell their credit card details on to criminals for a huge sum of cash.

Both Ashley Madison, whose slogan is “Life’s short. Have an affair”, and the hackers, have both taken what can be described as a buccaneering approach to making profits.

And so, returning to my cautionary tale theme, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Margaret Thatcher and the other architects of the “entrepreneurial revolution” should have seen this coming and known better when they began trumpeting the idea that greed is good and society doesn’t exist.

In an inherited world where profit always comes first and where personal fortunes are so highly prized, the Ashley Madison saga is merely one logical consequence.

But one can be certain that Mrs T, whose free market reforms in Britain triggered a wave of similar revolutions elsewhere, did not foresee such an outcome.

Her zeal for unconstrained capitalism – and hatred of the previous post-war consensus in which prosperity and power were shared like never before or since – was only ever matched by blindness to the unfortunate social consequences her actions caused.

Yet – and here I will depart from the usual Tory-bashing script – Mrs Thatcher was not a wholly immoral woman.

Indeed, though she often encouraged the opposite, she had a profound belief in righteousness, integrity, thrift and the importance of family.

So, for example, when the former prime minister sold off state assets, she hoped privatisations could spur a “popular capitalism” in which companies like British Gas would be responsibly owned for life by millions of Britons.

Instead, individuals bought and quickly sold shares for an easy profit and the stock soon passed into the hands of a few wealthy investors and corporations, including many of from overseas.

Mrs Thatcher had similar hopes when she sold 5.5million council houses to tenants.

But, again, many sold them quickly and a third of these homes are now owned by private landlords, with the multi-millionaire son of her right-to-buy minister Ian Gow personally profiting from 40 such properties.

And when Mrs Thatcher opened up the credit markets, she again hoped Britons would be cautious and responsible with their newly won economic freedom.

But instead, unable to get a pay rise through defeated trade unions, many used loans to spend wildly and household debt exploded to become the fourth highest total in the world.

Yet, while such effects of buccaneer capitalism - with the Ashley Madison saga one of the more juicy examples of such devil-may-care behaviour – were warned about, no one really knows the future prospects of any one political decision.

But, what we can do, is learn from past choices.

The current 36-year period of free-market economic orthodoxy and the previous, 34-year social-democratic consensus have lasted almost as long as each other.

So, for those of us without large vested interests in preserving the status quo, it should now be possible to appraise both systems without dogmatic attachment to either.

It surely must be possible for nearly everyone to see that some areas of the economy require greater regulation, some industries and services should be in public ownership while other former state monopolies should absolutely remain privately owned.

Stories like Ashley Madison should make us think about hard about what sort of economy and politics we truly want and what kind of world we want to live in.