Labour's growth policy ignores people in favour of finance

I would have like to tell you what part Labour plans for Scotland in this regard, but since Scotland as a country is not mentioned in the document, that would be hard, even if that is totally typical of Labour’s current attitude towards anything of intertest to National readers.

There is, however, an obvious explanation for this oversight. Instead of thinking about how Labour might benefit real people outside the City of London when preparing this policy it did, instead, seek advice from ten financial establishment grandees when preparing this new report.

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No trade unionist was apparently consulted. Nor was anyone with a mortgage, or a pension. It also seems that actual people with real savings or investments were also ignored. After all, why would a left-of-centre party worry about them when Labour could instead create a policy that does instead only seem to serve the interests of those at the top of the financial service sector?

The echoes of Margaret Thatcher 

That this was their goal is painfully apparent from the document.

For example, in its opening paragraphs it declares that: “Our history as an innovating, industrious, trading nation was built on the foundations of a strong financial services sector.”

Not only is the identity of the nation that Labour refers to not made clear but the claim made is completely false.

It could reasonably be argued that the UK’s financial services sector was built on the foundation of slavery.

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It could also be argued that there is a good reason why the Industrial Revolution was named as such and was not called the Finance Revolution.

That is because, as a matter of fact, the Industrial Revolution happened to supply real people with real things that met real needs that were made by other real people in ways that had never happened before, albeit that most of those employed to do that were profoundly exploited by their employers, who then banked their ill-gotten gains.

As I also know from my own studies of the financial history of the period, accounting, banking, insurance, and other financial services developed as a consequence of, and somewhat after, the onset of, the Industrial Revolution. They did not precede it and were most certainly not its foundation. Labour has got that wrong.

What Labour has also got wrong is the whole thrust of this report. By saying that financial services, which have never produced anything that anyone can live off, will be the foundation of our economy they echo the words and philosophy of Margaret Thatcher.

By claiming that they will relax financial services regulation, which they trumpet that they will within the report, they echo the words of Gordon Brown before the global financial crisis of 2008, and his own fall from grace.

No end to excessive banker bonuses

By suggesting that technology provides answers to the problems that we face, they reproduce the naïve faith of Tony Blair in IT even though rumour had it that he had never touched a computer.

When they say that they want to enhance the international competitiveness of financial services, they sound terribly like the tax haven jurisdictions with which I engaged for far too many years when fighting for tax justice.

And on that tax justice point, let me also note that Rachel Reeves has simultaneously promised that there will be no new caps on bankers’ bonuses or windfall taxes on the excess profits banks, even though both bonuses and profits have been massively increased in the UK’s banks as a result of the Bank of England policy of increasing interest rates.

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Even when Labour talks about a review of pension and savings arrangements the focus is on how to make life better for those running such schemes, rather than on the needs of those, like you and me, who might make use them.

Please trust me when I say that as a non-party politician of social democrat persuasion I would love, one day, to find something that Labour says that I could applaud. I cannot remember the last time the time had that opportunity, and this policy document just provides me with another reason to despair.

Having spent 40 years of my life as a chartered accountant, I can find nothing that Labour has to say that will actually solve the simple problem that the UK has, which is how to match up the more than £8 trillion of financial worth which people in the UK as a whole have with the simple and straightforward need that exists for investment in hospitals, schools, social housing, transport, new energy systems, and other climate-related changes.

Doing that is the one, and I suggest the only, goal that Labour should have for financial services in this country.

That is because if Labour could release those funds for that purpose (and I have suggested ways in which that is possible), then Labour could be a force for good, as would be the financial services industry.

Instead, Labour is choosing to maintain the status quo, continuing to let the financial services sector extracts profit from the rest of the economy in a way that maintains the divisions of wealth and inequality that exist within the UK, as well as between England and Scotland, which, as ever, it has chosen to ignore. So why is anyone going to vote for them, unless they’re a banker?