IT’S KIND of reassuring that whenever a new figurehead for all that is wrong with global capitalism appears, there are also British politicians working in the background for the bad guys.

So with luxury goods firm LVMH and its chairman Bernard Arnault. In LVMH the L and V are for Luis Vuitton, the high-end fashion house which will sell you a handbag for £3,000. 

The M and H are for top-dollar drinks firm Moet Hennessy, which will sell you champagne and cognac.

LVMH also have lots of other luxury brands, including Tiffany, Christian Dior, Givenchy and Bvlgari.

The last decade has seen the poor squeezed, but the rich get richer, so selling luxury goods has been very profitable. Actual “high net worth individuals” buy LVMH goods, and so do people with less money and less sense who think buying the totems of the rich will help them become like the rich. 

So LVMH boss Bernard Arnault and family have become, according to Forbes magazine, the richest family in the world, with a fortune of around £200 billion.

Arnault and LVMH have recently become poster-boys for the ugliness of capitalism for two reasons.

First, French workers are currently staging militant protests against the “centrist” Macron government’s attempts to squeeze working people — President Emmanuel Macron wants to cut their pensions, but trade unionists, students and protesters say he should tax the rich instead. 

In these ongoing protests, workers stormed LVMH HQ. Train workers letting off flares and smoke bombs in the HQ of the high-end fashion and champagne firm was a compelling image, reported around the world.

Rail worker Fabien Villedieu declared: “You’re looking for money to finance pensions? Take it from the pockets of billionaires,” in the smoke-filled luxury handbag HQ.

LVMH is also in the news because 74-year-old Arnault is reportedly auditioning his five children to see which one he will let take over his firm. 

It’s a real-life version of the TV show Succession, showing the cruelty of capitalism, where even among themselves the super-rich put hard-hearted “competition” above being nice to your family.

It’s all very symbolic of plutocratic capitalism.

But it also seems very French — so I am pleased to report that our own political class are so absolutely committed to serving the big money that our best people are in on the LVMH game too. 

Lord Charles Powell is an influential Brit. He is an adviser to arms firms BAE systems and Thales and a director of Matheson bank.

But he also does a lot for LVMH — Powell is both a director on the LVMH board and chairman of LVMH in the UK.  

Powell came to prominence as one of Margaret Thatcher’s top advisers: it’s telling that a key architect of Thatcher’s supposed “popular capitalism” ends up helping hawk handbags to the very well-off for the super-rich.