With Labour’s bloody leadership contest behind them, John McDonnell wants to get back to business. This is a man who lists ‘fermenting the overthrow of capitalism’ as his pastime on Who’s Who. Now he is the Labour Party’s shadow chancellor. So with the renewed Corbynista mandate, what now? Having picked the brains of Ed Miliband and others, he says a Labour government would be defined by its willingness to step in – but only gently – to help out business. For McDonnell, that plan to intervene would take the form of a mammoth spending scheme backed by a national investment bank pumped with £100bn. He said his big idea was that:
‘The state has a role to play in the economy of working with entrepreneurs and wealth creators, developing and investing in the long term in patient and long term investment, helping people develop their products and in that way you create a prosperous society.’
The language is more moderate than overthrowing capitalism. And, to be honest, what he says chimes with Theresa May’s plans to give the state a role in creating what she calls an ‘industrial strategy’ – two words that Sajid Javid, Cameron’s business secretary, said should never ben heard so on the same sentence. So the Tories have shifted towards Labour’s position. And Labour is trying to moderate its language.
Of course, there’s a proxy now for gauging your commitment to consumer power: Uber. For or against? He was against, and proposed regulating them out of the market – or at least making them less competitive. ‘A basic interventionist government would ensure there are basic standards in law that they would abide by,’ he said. Sadiq Khan has lost no time, as London mayor, thinking of expensive laws to make life harder for Uber drivers (some of them former bus drivers seeking better pay and working conditions than this heavily-regulated sector was able to offer).
McDonnell’s speech today may well use similarly emollient language. But when Theresa May gives her speech to Tory conference next week, we can expect not to hear the kind of language David Cameron’s used in his 2008 defence of the free enterprise system. And more ways of saying, explicitly or in code, that this free market has gone too far and it’s time for state intervention.
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