If Labour had won the 1979 Election, then Tony Benn was to have been the Minister responsible for putting the North Sea oil revenue into a sovereign wealth fund.
By that means, Norway has acquired the highest per capita income in the world.
That could have been Britain.
Benn's Britain.
We had a lot less Oil and a Lot more people. There was an article in a boradsheet recently, I think it was the Guardian, which suggested that had such a policy been enacted, the fund would have been worth an accumulated total of £7000 per capita with inflation, or 420 billion Fairly meaningless Peanuts compared to Norway, and far less in the long term than using the revenue to push most direct taxes down the near their Laffer curve peak (though I won't deny we may have gone slightly too far with it) has gained the UK in the last 30 years.
ReplyDeleteAnd regardless, was it ever official Labour policy to do such a thing? The Nordic and Germanic left had always been far more fiscally and economically sensible and pragmatic than then Old Labour-Left anyway.
Yes, this was Labour Party policy. And I cannot imagine that even you would question the fiscal rectitude of the Callaghan Government. What do you think that the strikes were about?
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