Good as Gould

It was good to hear from Bryan Gould in the Guardian recently. He began his excellent book, ‘A Future for Socialism’, back in 1989 with, “The Thatcherite experiment is now approaching its end”.

Sadly it has taken almost a further twenty years for that statement to be confirmed. And what a tragedy that now millions of people will lose their jobs and thousands more will lose homes, savings and pensions to show Gould’s analysis and prescription to be spot on.

The economic crisis has lead some to look back to see where it all went wrong. Gordon Browns bank nationalisation has reminded people of the 2003 Manifesto. On rereading it is far less suicidal than Peter Mandelson’s 1998 proclamation that new Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’.

It is worth remembering that Michael Foot lost that election not on economic policy but because of the Falklands War. Many will be surprised to hear that his successor Neil Kinnock wrote quite a good book on economics. ‘Making Our Way’ was published in 1986 and it’s not bad. He wrote, “The Labour Party’s economic priority is to expand investment – in industry, in ideas and in people – and to form a partnership for production between, government managers and workers committed to the modernisation of economy and society”.

It was Gould however, the face of the 1987 election, who was the most articulate in presenting the case for modern socialism. He argued in ‘A Future for Socialism’ that;

“The concession that full employment could no longer be the central objective of economic policy was of profound significance. It fundamentally undermined the post- war accommodation of capital and labour. Labour – even- organised labour – was dealt at severe blow. The balance of advantage in the labour market swung decisively to the employer.
The implications are wider still. If the government was now powerless to intervene in the workings of the labour market, and if economic policy as a whole was now to be defined in terms of what is acceptable to the money markets – if in other words markets alone were to determine outcome in these central parts of the economy – why should not markets not also prevail in other spheres of policy? If markets were to be trusted to produce the right results in economic policy, why not in education, or housing, or health care? So it was the Left sold the pass and lost the argument”.

How right he was he was also dead right that Britain had fallen in to habit of, “giving absolute priority to those who held assets and dealt in money, as opposed to those who made and provided goods and services and tried to sell them in international markets”.

Unfortunately when he ran for Labour leader there where few Gouldites and his anti-EU stance was against the grain of the time. So instead of following his prescription we followed a different one from the Cannon and Ball of contemporary economic thinking,

“For a time, it appeared as though Thatcherism’s harsh medicine and ‘enterprise culture’ had produced the great economic leap forward that Britain needed. In the 1990’s Britain can boast of some notable economic strengths – for example the resilience and internationalisation of our top companies; our strong industries like pharmaceuticals, aerospace, retailing and media; the pre-eminence of the City of London”.

Yes that’s Mandelson and Liddel, in ‘The Blair Revolution’, in 1996. Of course we may have had more such companies if we had not had Thatcher’s ‘enterprise culture’!
As recently as 1995 in the introduction to ‘The City in Europe and the World’ he argued that the City was the ‘economic powerhouse of Europe’ and urged Germany to become more like Britain. God forbid. Mandelson once gave the Churchill lecture in Berlin he could have done with Churchill’s comment, “I would rather see finance less proud and industry more content”.

Now the crisis is turning conventional wisdom on its head its time to state some facts firstly a deregulated city has had a license to print money yet now we need it can’t be found, secondly a healthy retail sector is a result of wealth not is cause, and a house is a place to live not a cash point.

Now the money lenders are being thrown out of the temple its time to look again at Gould’s ideas. This crisis is a turning point. The country is crying out for change lets not repeat our mistakes lets follow Gould’s advice;

“A Labour Government that wished to meet the twin objectives of managing the economy efficiently and putting socialist principles into practice would have to be clear that this bias in favour of financial orthodoxy must be reversed. Giving priority to the wealth creators is not in itself socialism, and it would require a radical departure from past practice and attitudes. It would take a Labour chancellor to be clear that it was the real economy, rather than the money economy that mattered, and it was our task to serve the interests of those who created real wealth”.