A New Day?

Nationalisation is not a party point. Labour and the Tories have both done it repeatedly, and it is the Tories whose record in this regard is more uniformly successful. Admittedly, they have used the device much less frequently. But their nationalisation of electricity was a great success, and their nationalisation of Rolls Royce was a triumph in the long term.

However, if the money can now be found to nationalise Northern Rock, then it should be found to renationalise the railways (which only make a profit at all because of guaranteed public subsidies – give that a moment to sink in) and the rip-off utilities. But I hope that the Government will turn Northern Rock back into the locally rooted mutual building society that it used to be in happier times.

There are those who regret the failure of the Attlee Government to honour the 1945 Manifesto pledge to nationalise the land and the clearing banks. I don’t. But if there had been any chance of the subsequent implementation of Chestertonian Distributism on the land and mutualisation of the banks in the Forties, then I would.

Might there be any such chance today? After all, just listen to the fearful wailing of those who had thought that they had banished civil society, acting as the democratic State, from economic life, but who now see it coming back with a vengeance because nothing else works. As someone once put it, “A new day has dawned, has it not?”

Well, has it?