Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

The Banks

There is hardly a current affairs programme these days with a financial section which does not feature some discussion over banking profits and bonuses. There is a point which is central to the discussion but which there is often not time in these sandwiched interviews to develop. It is this. Nobody minds people like Sir Richard Branson or J.K.Rowling earning great wealth, because these people create wealth for others to share through using their products  or working in their dependent industries. They have enormous creative talent and enrich the culture of our country. We are all better off because of what they have done. Where would we be without Virgin Atlantic or Harry Potter? Moreover they have done this without the need to be bailed out by the taxpayer and they have not contributed, by reckless gambling, to the crash which brought on the recession.

The same cannot be said for the Investment Bankers, or better put the Banking Gamblers. What they do helps only those in their game. So little of it is needed by anybody that they are allowed to keep a staggering proportion of their winnings which are sanitised and called profits. Whatever may be said in their defence they are, as previously described by Lord Turner, engaged in a socially useless activity for personal gain. This is an unacceptable face of capitalism which is not only uselss but dangerous, since when it goes wrong it threatens the livelihoods of ordinary people whose lifetime earnings for their toil do not equal a single bonus of these modern day alchemists.

We cannot stop them doing this but we can stop funding them. We can ring fence the essential economic service of true banking from this activity of financial fornication and we can make clear to those addicted to it whether Shareholders, bosses or dealers that when the bell rings time they will be left to go bust. We do not care if they take off to Dubai or Japan because we no longer consider this carbuncle on the face of the great London tradition of financial professionalism a vital national asset, rather a reeking liability without which we would be better off.

We need to worry about getting the model of our economy into a sustainable and socially just format. We need to reduce the cost of housing, borrow less, earn more of what we spend, save more, make more of what we buy and restore our industrial strength. We also need to transfer resources from the public to the private sector, but take public responsibility for energy supplies, infrastructure, public services etc. No more management through quangos and regulators financed through inner city neglect. And definitely no more gambling with taxpayer money or secured by taxpayer guarantees.

Workers Co-operatives

The Tories have just unveiled a weird plan to turn welfare services and schools into workers co-operatives. Labour has plans not wholly dissimilar.

This blog will not comment on the efficacy of these proposals until more is known. It does hasten to remind its readers of the complete fiasco of the NHS internal market introduced by the Tories on their privatisation binge years back and the inherent weakness in trying to make a business out of a service. This is what caused the GP surgeries to go to pot.

Some elements of modern life must operate at a profit to create wealth. These elements are mostly best in private hands. But there are other elements, infrastructure and public services, which are there to enable the rest of the economy to work smoothly and these are best left under some form of public control. This control needs to be accessible and democratic as public money is involved. Where relevant that democratic control should be exercised locally and not through Whitehall. This is a point made by Cameron. Whether workers co-operatives in primary schools and welfare services would achieve that, is very much open to question.