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The unmissable and the very, very missable

Monday, 18th February 2008

You can safely ignore almost everything written about the Northern Rock fiasco. Most of it is repetitive and misses the real point. But on no account miss the great Anatole Kaletsky who gets to the heart of it:

He should have announced that Northern Rock would be nationalised not to keep it in business, but to close it down; that the bank would stop lending new money or accepting new deposits as of tomorrow; that all the company's retail deposits would be shifted immediately to the National Savings system, while all the wholesale bonds would be replaced with Government gilts. The company would then be put into run-off, with the Treasury recouping its money gradually as existing borrowers repaid their mortgages over the years.
Nationalisation, in other words, made sense only as a necessary legal stepping-stone to the orderly liquidation that Northern Rock required as soon as it ran out of money in September.
To use nationalisation to keep the bank in business and its staff in state-subsidised employment would be a travesty of all the economic principles that “new” Labour has claimed to believe in. It would represent a grossly unfair distortion of Britain's banking business and would make a mockery of all the arguments Mr Brown has vociferously advanced in Brussels against state subsidies and protectionism elsewhere in Europe. Worst of all, the provision of £100 billion of state guarantees to a grossly mismanaged and insolvent mortgage bank would be a gross insult to the hundreds of thousands of workers in businesses from coal, steel and textiles to performance cars and advanced electronics whose jobs could have been saved with Government guarantees or “temporary” nationalisations costing one-tenth or even one-hundredth of the £100 billion that the Government is now devoting to just 6,000 jobs at Northern Rock.

If Kaletsky's is the one unmissable piece, then I suppose I should be balanced and link to the one truly missable piece by that hilariously pretentious twit, CPGB-stalwart Martin Jacques, entitled

Northern Rock's rescue is part of a geopolitical sea change

Er, no. It's coz it wasn't run proper, innit.

BTW, I like Harry's take on the ridiculous Martin J:

There's not usually any reason to bother reading the utter drivel Martin Jacques produces these days but I'm glad I scanned through his latest effort today because at the foot of the page there is a link to the new online archive of the entire back catalogue of Marxism Today from 1980 till the end in 1991.
...Jacques has a rather immodest take on the magazine he edited and I had a particular chuckle at this:
If the 1990s was, true to the idiom of New Labour, characterised by fad and fashion, Marxism Today was quite the opposite: it was a magazine of profound political and intellectual substance.
I'd say that, not for the first time, Jacques has that exactly the wrong way round. While the Marxism Today crowd of CP affiliated 'intellectuals' drifted off into irrelevant think-tanks, pointless areas of academia and some of the most unreadable journalism of the nineties (just think Charles Leadbetter), it was MT's readers in the Labour Party who got on with the political substance - you know finally winning elections, getting power and improving the country, all that kind of boring stuff.
And if you glance through a lot of the MT material, particularly the later stuff, that is hardly surprising. While Labour got on with the hard business of modernising and dealing with the far-left, Jacques and co were waffling about the cafe society and turning into a proto-type of the Guardian's G2 section.