FTAdviser.com

Twenty years minus one day from Margaret Thatcher’s famous Europe speech in Brugges, and 15 kilometres down the road in Ghent, I found myself just over a week ago giving a speech to help Flanders celebrate 25 years of innovation.

She warned of a lack of accountability that was inherent in the European political project, and importantly, she was fighting for Europe to be strong by keeping the unit of accountability as close to the person or country as possible.

Everyone on the 10 person panel after my speech ate from the public trough of funds, and yet intriguingly agreed with my speech’s thesis that Europe is feudal.

People have voted in a system whereby the implicit deal is that they subordinate themselves to a master who promises to take care of them. It’s no longer the monarchy, but a large, unaccountable state. Big government creates dependency and weakens the individual spirit.

Proof positive of my thesis: the accounts of the EU have gone without an auditor’s sign-off for more than a decade, and there is no uproar.

We have the richest poor people of the world in the UK and Europe. Isn’t that good or enough?

We see everywhere the building of a society for the lowest common denominator. Even the Football Association announced that it would remove “winning” from matches for seven and eight year olds. No results will be collected. Whether you win or lose won’t matter. And you can be sure that if you can’t win, fewer will train for victory.

Today we try to engineer fairness everywhere, and yet one of the assumptions of capitalism is that there are winners and losers. The market failure that was Lehmans was allowed to happen bringing down innocent employees with it.

But isn’t that ruthless, not to care about society?

Successful entrepreneurs tend to care about the outcomes in society. Case in point: Paul Barry-Walsh. He founded SafetyNet which he sold to Guardian IT making a fortune.

What he did next, however, was to give people who had fallen by the wayside a chance to get back up on the road. Barry-Walsh set up the Fredericks Foundation, the leading micro-finance organisation in the UK, which makes micro-loans to hundreds of ex-convicts and recovering drug addicts.

So what we should really care about as a society is how to create more Michaelangelos, or Rebecca Adlingtons, or Charles Dunstones.

It’s a tough call. The world is going to hell it seems, and yet, we have to decide what kind of society we want to have – where greatness is encouraged, accountability enforced, or where medicracy rages. And the rules of engagement that we embrace now as many panic, will shape our future for the next cycle.

I know which future I’m up for.

Julie Meyer is chief executive of Ariadne Capital