Has New Labour moved left?
Government economic policy has shifted drastically. But it is not a shift to the left. Today’s capitalism is, as the Financial Times writer Martin Wolf has put it, a machine for “privatising gains and socialising losses”. The change is that, in the crisis, the focus has shifted from the private gains (currently more meagre) to socialising big losses. A genuine left-wing response to the crisis requires a workers’ plan — a drive to mobilise the working class to take control of the huge accumulated gains of capitalist production, currently monopolised by the rich elite. • When Northern Rock first ran into trouble, in September 2007, the New Labour government shied away from talk of nationalising it (as the Lib Dems quickly advocated) like an old-fashioned prude from talk of sex. Now talk of nationalisation is as commonplace in government as talk of sex in a brothel. The latest step-up in Government ownership of the banks could even be a slide towards full nationalisation. Yet the same ban
