Cable's Fable

It no more matters what sex a company director is than it matters what sex a Member of Parliament is. Which is to say, not in the least. Labour, which like the other parties is already selecting parliamentary candidates, urgently needs to produce a parliamentary equivalent to its policy of a worker representative on every remuneration committee, while also, as is quietly happening, building on the very good start made in the form of that policy, and while also, as is not happening to anything like the necessary extent, making that policy known to the general electorate.

As is understood by German and other Christian Democrats (which are essentially what huge numbers of Tory voters are, hence their flight from the neoliberal Conservative Party now that the Cold War is a fading memory), among the many conservative principles that worker representatives on boards and remuneration committees would articulate would be the priority of the family and the local community, together with a patriotism which includes economic patriotism, itself including both tight controls on capital movement and tight controls on immigration.

Integral to national sovereignty, including to national security, are a strong manufacturing base, control of our own food and fuel supplies, and the ownership of our industries and enterprises by our own citizens. As representatives from the shop floor would understand. Such representation is one of several German features that we urgently need to adopt.

Others are regional banking with close ties to the agricultural and manufacturing sectors; small and medium-sized family businesses on the Mittelstand model; and vocational as well as general skills training, accorded the same respect as the very high level of academic achievement that Germany has also retained and which we must restore here in the United Kingdom.

As Maurice Glasman and Jon Cruddas have now been saying for years. As Ed Miliband is known to say in private. If the BBC were ever to allow any of those three on air instead of embittered Blairite relics and Nigel "No Seats" Farage, then we might be able to hear it directly from them. Imagine that.