Six months ago, just before I vanished from these pages on a prolonged sickie, I wrote a column expressing the opinion that the mothers of Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown must have been frightened during their pregnancy by rabid Trotskyists. No other explanation, I felt, could account for the terror both men exhibited when faced with the danger that what they were doing might actually be socialist.
My complaint arose from the massive taxpayers’ bailout of the banking system launched by the Treasury. It was an exercise which undoubtedly saved this country – and indirectly the world economy – from total financial meltdown. But neither of the two men would admit that what they had done amounted to nationalisation and effectively put them in charge of a huge swathe of our banking system.
Darling repeatedly insisted that it was no part of a government’s job to actually run the banks. Why not? Because that wasn’t what governments should do, said Darling, with almost comic circularity. At the same time, he was lecturing the European Union about the need to avoid over-regulation of the financial sector.
Well, matters have not improved in the intervening half-year. Although everyone now understands that the misery of unemployment, bankruptcy, home repossessions and all the rest can be heaped at the feet of wildly irresponsible bankers, nothing seems to have changed.
Six months on, Darling is still saying that tighter regulation is not the answer and has fallen back instead on delivering pious sermons to these self-same bankers, telling them they must change their greedy ways. It is in the boardrooms of the banks, he says, that the big decisions must be made to change the culture of the financial system, not in the corridors of Whitehall. In defiance of both the EU and the new Barack Obama administration in Washington, he flatly rejects the idea that over-large banks should be split between their high street functions and the speculative investment part of the business – the part rightly called “casino” banking.
So how are these bankers to be induced to reform themselves? Why, by giving them even bigger sacks of gold, of course. With this in mind, Darling has allowed bank boardrooms to reconstruct massive bonus mechanisms to encourage the likes of the Royal Bank of Scotland’s new chief executive, Stephen Hester, and Lloyds TSB’s Eric Daniels to do their jobs properly. If early reports of this scheme are correct, it could give Hester anything up to £15 million in salary, cash bonuses and share options – simply to do what it says on the tin.
This would be bad enough in itself. But the really astonishing feature of the whole affair is that the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, has publicly dissented from the Chancellor’s sanctimonious and limp-wristed concoction and has entered his own much more robust and radical formula for change.
Successive Labour Chancellors who once suffered the reactionary attentions of past Governors of the Bank when they tried to enact their mildly leftish manifesto commitments would have been astounded by such an extraordinary exchange of roles.
But it is scarcely a matter for rejoicing that a Governor of the Bank of England is now well to the left of a Labour – albeit a “new” Labour – Chancellor. After all, we now have army generals and former heads of the civil service telling the Prime Minister he is wrong to require the Iraq enquiry to be conducted behind closed doors. And bewigged judges are telling the Justice Secretary that his detention rules are unjust. It isn’t they who have changed; it is “new” Labour.
That is a distressing state of affairs for anyone who imagined that Labour was a progressive party dedicated to defending human rights and protecting the have-nots from the have-too-muches. However, for me, perhaps the most distressing sight this week was the appalling picture which adorned the front page of The Guardian on Monday. It showed three burly coppers gripping a woman by the throat and twisting her face towards the camera, apparently for the purposes of
recording her face for the police
database.
The scene it shows is utterly disgusting – and would have been disgusting even if the woman had been guilty of some serious offence. But she hadn’t. Although she and a friend were thrown into a paddy wagon and locked up for four days, both were released without charge. Moreover, a video which The Guardian obtained showed even more horrible scenes of violent, almost sado-masochistic restraint of the two women.
Their offence in the eyes of the West Yorkshire police? While attending a peaceful climate change demonstration, they had demanded that an officer who was illegally wearing no number should identify himself. When he refused, they tried to photograph him. This, in the eyes of the police, is a high crime and misdemeanour.
All this, together with the shocking scenes of police violence at the G20 demonstrations, has taken place under a Labour Government – or, as Neil Kinnock would have said, a Labour Government. And not just any old Labour Government. A Labour Government which has been in office for 12 years.
