The Wisdom of Solomon II

Solomon Hughes writes:

The Labour leadership campaign has brought out some of the media’s more imaginative techniques. Or perhaps I should say “imaginary.”

Because a lot of the debate as reported takes place in an alternative reality, a fictional land that is like our own, only different. Sometimes this takes the form of small but repeated details.

John “Morons” McTernan regularly appears as a commentator on the leadership race. He is always described on the BBC, or in the Times or the Telegraph or the Guardian, as “a former aide to Tony Blair.”

McTernan was one of Blair’s many aides in 2007. He was the only “chief of staff” to Jim Murphy in 2015.

Whenever I apply for a job I have to list my current employment, but whenever McTernan is used as an authority, we slip back eight years in time.

There is an obvious reason for this: McTernan was a bit-part actor in the “success” of Blair.

Few of us noticed him back in the 2000s, but he was one of the big stars who crashed to the ground in one of Labour’s worst defeats ever, when the party lost a whole nation.

Live in the past and McTernan is an authority. Live in the present and he’s a disaster. 

The media want to back Labour’s “modernisers” by living firmly in the past. Bigger issues exist in this parallel world reporting.

Again and again “nationalisation” floats over the leadership campaign. And it always comes with a “that’s so 1980s” feeling.

So David Miliband writes in the Guardian that “the Corbyn programme looks backwards” because it has “pledges of nationalisation” which Miliband “learned were wrong when I joined the Labour party in 1981.”

The constant press approach to nationalisation — that it is something expensive and unpleasant from the past — took a particularly weird turn when BBC Radio 4’s James Naughtie “confronted” Andy Burnham about his plans for partial railway renationalisation.

Burnham argued that “as franchises expire we should bring them back under public control.” (Sadly Burnham has retreated slightly from this position. He now says the public sector should be allowed to bid for them.)

So Naughtie reached for his anti-nationalisation arguments, asking how Burnham would pay for his plan. Naughtie said of Network Rail, “you have to buy it back.”

Burnham was clearly fazed by the question, because, as he pointed out to Naughtie, the public already owns Network Rail, and always has.

In the alternative reality, Network Rail is a thriving private firm. In the real world, it is one among the fairly frequent nationalisations carried out by the Blair-Brown governments.

Railtrack, the previously privatised track operator, failed in 2002. The Hatfield rail crash showed Railtrack and its subcontractors like Balfour Beatty were not maintaining the tracks properly, leading to deaths on the line.

Railtrack couldn’t make a profit and be safe, so it went bankrupt. The nationally owned Network Rail took over.

This was one of many times New Labour governments took over failing private firms.

The Channel Tunnel Rail Link — the line between London and the tunnel — went bust and was nationalised in 2006.

British Energy, the firm which ran most of Britain and Northern Ireland’s nuclear power stations, was nationalised in 2004.

The firm was going bust. Leaving nuclear power stations run by a failing company was dangerous: not only could lights have started going out, but also a failing firm could not be trusted with these dangerous plants.

And of course, most obviously, during the massive banking bailout some of the top financial institutions — including RBS and Lloyds — were either partly or wholly nationalised.

The Blairites used to make fun of the left for asking for the nationalisation of the banks — and then ended up doing it themselves.

In fact banks have been nationalised across Europe in response to the failure of capitalism. So there is nothing “80s” about nationalisation. However, the Blairite nationalisations had three features.

First, they were bailouts to help failing private firms.

Second, they ran the nationalised firms like private corporations, with the same or similar managements. Even though we own RBS, Gordon Brown did not change the board.

He did not give the bank a new social mission. He did not make sure the bank would lend to small businesses to get the economy going, or stop it ripping off private customers.

Where previous Labour governments founded investment or high street banks with a popular mission, this nationalisation didn’t change the bank.

Third, they tried where possible to reprivatise the firms, even if this meant a loss to the government or that the reprivatised firms needed continuing subsidy.

So British Energy was sold off to Electricité de France (EDF) in 2009. Ironically, EDF is state-owned — but by the French state.

Britain needs power so the government is backing EDF’s new nuclear stations, but they will need a subsidy. So we nationalised a failure, and will then subsidise a private firm.

There is no real argument about nationalisation being necessary in the real world, as opposed to the parallel world of the press — only about how it should be done and who it should be done for.

Corbyn’s campaign is arguing that nationalisation should be done for social good, and there should be different forms of public ownership.

This brings us to another word which seems to have different meanings in the media reporting: “pragmatism.” Kendall, Cooper and Burnham are “pragmatic,” Corbyn is “purist.”

I’m all for doing things sensibly and effectively, but many of New Labour’s actions weren’t pragmatic. They only make sense as some kind of irrational worship of the gods of private enterprise or US military might.

Private finance initiatives, known as PFIs, are more expensive than public investment. Paying private firms to do operations was more expensive and destabilised the NHS.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq or the bombing of Libya caused chaos that still hurts us and them.

If that is pragmatism, I am a banana.