Modern capitalism is disrupting society and undermining human values, Labour party leader Wouter Bos said in a major speech in Amsterdam on Monday night.

Bos used the annual Den Uyl speech, named after the former Labour prime minister Joop den Uyl, to discuss the effects of globalisation, neo-liberalism and capitalism which, he said, had not ‘led the west into widescale poverty’.
High living standards have been achieved and ‘we will survive this crisis as well’, Bos was quoted by news agency ANP as saying. But at the same time ‘human values are being undermined by the continuing pressure of commercialisation on public life’ and the constant drive towards ‘more, more, more and now, now, now’.
Illusion
The finance minister called for measures to protect public interests to the power of the market. ‘That is safer than trying to tame the market with a powerful regulatory system,’ he said. The idea of a strong regulator is increasingly being seen as naive, he said. ‘Perfect regulation is an illusion.’
The Volkskrant said Bos used the speech to say farewell to the Third Way, the left-wing Liberal movement which social democratic parties embraced in the 1990s. Bos, the paper said, admitted he was a child of the Third Way and said it had ‘corrected high expectations from the state’.
But at the same time, all parties from left to right had underestimated the power of the market combined with globalisation. ‘We went to sleep with a relatively tame free market and we woke with an unchained monster,’ he said.
And he pointed out, British Labour leader Gordon Brown – who led the deregulation process in London’s financial centre – has a ‘massive credibility problem’ in trying to get it back under control.