I HAVE often wondered whether the Tribune canteen – aka the Gay Hussar restaurant in Soho – was bugged by Government spooks. The question flitted into my mind again this week after a strange coincidence of events linking the left-wing eating-house with Gordon Brown’s rediscovery of old-fashioned socialism.
A handful of us were lunching with Michael Foot in the upstairs room a week last Wednesday when John, the restaurant’s admirably well-informed proprietor, expressed the opinion that the Government now had a splendid opportunity. With bank shares in freefall, he suggested, the Treasury could buy a controlling slice of the banking sector for next to nothing.
And lo! At sparrow fart on Monday morning, Alistair Darling announced that that was pretty well exactly what the Treasury was about to do. Had he been listening? If he was, he would also have heard former Mirror man Bill Hagerty reminding Michael Foot that what the Government was planning bore a striking resemblance to the manifesto of which he had fought the 1983 general election – a document which Gerald Kaufman famously described as “the longest suicide note in history”.
Then Bill Keegan, The Observer’s economics man, added his two-penn’orth. His wife, he told us, had remarked over breakfast that morning that capitalism would work quite well, provided it had a solid underpinning of socialism. This perception – which the Chinese Communists seem to have reached some time ago – might well have been the idea that made a socialist rescue plan acceptable to the Prime Minister and his Chancellor.
But whatever its origins, we Tribunites are entitled to express just a trace of self-congratulation over this conversion. As Michael himself told The Guardian last weekend, the left was right all along.
Not that the Government is keen to admit any such thing. Treasury spokespersons were still insisting on Monday that the partial nationalisation of Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds-TSB and HBOS was not really nationalisation at all. Oh no, no, no – perish the thought. The message was that these august institutions would eventually be sold back to the very same people whose greed brought them to their knees in the first place. And then, of course, it will be back to business as usual.
Did I say the very same people? Well, not quite. At least one of them will be missing: Sir Fred Goodwin, the disastrous chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, got the bullet. However, it looks as if he will be one of the very few to pay for their errors with their jobs. Like that luckless admiral, he has been executed “pour encourager les autres”.
Not for the first time, the man who has put his finger most effectively on the truth of this complex matter is Larry Elliott, economics editor of The Guardian. Writing on Monday, he hailed the Government’s plan as an example of how clear, simple and creative officials could be under great pressure. He went on: “This is not a case of Britain charting the world out of its financial imbroglio through disinterested altruism, as Gordon Brown would have us believe. It is because 11 years of grotesque government toadying to the City has left Britain in a parlous position and there was no alternative but to resort to concepts expunged from the ‘new’ Labour lexicon.”
As a verdict on Brown’s chancellorship, that falls a good way short of a Nobel Prize. But we must be grateful all the same. What Brown and Darling have done is the right thing and we Tribunites must now do our best to see that it is the start of a steady progress back to the principles which formed the foundation of the Labour Party.
By this, I do not mean a programme dictated by the Militant Tendency or the Socialist Workers’ Party. I do not expect to see a pledge of wholesale nationalisation. But I do expect to see, for instance, an end to the backdoor privatisation of the National Heath Service by way of private finance initiatives and similar shabby wheezes in the schools system.
A classic example of what I mean is the current programme of post office closures. In my part of north London – a village-like community close to Hampstead Heath – the closure of our local sub-post office is going to do heavy damage to Labour at the next election.
There were demonstrations, plus petitions which seemed to attract the signatures of everyone who was approached, as well as letters and editorials in the local newspapers. Most people thought the closure couldn’t possibly go ahead in the face of such united opposition. But it did. Not a blind bit of notice was taken of our views, although Brown was simultaneously promising to listen to the people.
So I was delighted to see Jon Cruddas take up the issue head on this week. He argues that taking over a few banks, although vitally important to the wider economy, is not enough. What we need are publicly-accountable, state-owned institutions in key areas of public interest – and he says the first test of this is what happens to the Post Office’s contract to pay state benefits, which is up for renewal.
If it is awarded to a private competitor, the Post Office network will continue to crumble, with another 2,500 post offices likely to close on top of the 2,500 already chopped. Yet the Post Office branch network offers the perfect vehicle for an effective “people’s bank” similar to the so-called Girobank launched by Harold Wilson and then slowly strangled by succeeding governments.
The sums of money needed to subsidise such a scheme are literally trivial when compared with the astronomical amounts being shelled out to the red braces brigade in the City.
But it would buy us a retail banking network that would provide a safe haven for hundred of thousands of working class savers who have been scared witless by the threat of a collapse in the commercial banking system.
It would be a good thing in itself. And it would also be a good thing electorally.
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