By Hand Or By Brain

If Northern Rock can be nationalised, then so should be the rip-off utilities and public transport network, increasingly owned from abroad while Britain laughably purports to be a sovereign state under such circumstances.

The utilities could be subjected to a permanently higher rate of corporation tax (with stringent regulation to ensure that no cost was passed on to workers, consumers, communities or the environment) until their shares became practically worthless. In the meantime, that tax would reimburse the employers’ National Insurance contributions in respect of employees aged 25 or under, aged 45 or over, and previously unemployed for 18 months or more (payable for the same length of time as the previous unemployment). That scheme would then have first call on the utilities’ profits after nationalisation.

As for the railways, they were only ever privatised on the understanding that their profitability would continue to be guaranteed by public subsidy. Uniquely, therefore, they should be renationalised without further compensation, their shareholders having already been more than compensated enough.

The old Clause IV:iv of the Labour Party Constitution did not mention public ownership. It was phrased in such a way that those who already had that idea in their heads could read it into the text. But that idea could not be read out of that text, which spoke only of “common ownership”. “Common ownership” could and can mean anything, especially when hedged about with such phrases as “the most equitable distribution ... that shall be possible” and “the best obtainable means”. The Webbs may have had their faults (they were eugenicists, for one thing), but they were nobody’s fools.

Public ownership is “the most equitable” and “the best obtainable” form of “the common ownership” of the utilities and the public transport network. “The most equitable” and “the best obtainable” form of “the common ownership” of Northern Rock would be as the locally-based mutual building society back into which the Government should turn it as soon as possible after a purely preliminary and transitional nationalisation.