Making UK plc a saleable commodity
"I don't want to be in the position where people are saying: 'Digby... the product isn't as good as it was'," said Digby Jones, trade and investment minister in the New Labour government and former head of the CBI. He was bemoaning the Government's plan to squeeze "non-domiciled" wealthy foreigners living in the UK ever so slightly for tax; and his comment sums up an entire philosophy of government.
The "product" is Britain, as a site for the world's wealthy to operate in.
The way Jones sees it is this. As trade and investment minister, he is the salesperson for this "product". Gordon Brown, I guess, is CEO of the enterprise producing the "product", and Alistair Darling is production manager.
The job of government is to "produce" its territory as a suitable site for the world's wealthy, and at an attractive price (i.e. low taxes on business and the wealthy).
Although Jones is off-message on the "non-domiciled" tax issue, on basic philosophy he expresses the New Labour line - thde world-wide neo-liberal consensus line - accurately and succinctly.
This "country-as-commodity" philosophy does not rule out a bit of "social" policy. To make "the product" attractive to global billionaires, the government may boost education, infrastructure, and some other public amenities, as well as keeping wages low and unions submissive.
The government may choose to sell its country as a "premium product", and charge a slightly higher "price" (tax on the rich and business) in return for greater public amenities.
But the bottom line is always the saleability of the "product" in the world market, not the interests of the mass of the population.
To try to go back to the old days when capitalist government policy was focused on building up a relatively comprehensive and self-sufficient industrial base for each country is neither workable, nor even desirable. Where those "old days" yielded welfare states more civilised than today's neo-liberalism, it was because of working-class pressure from below. Without that pressure from below, they would yield fascism, dictatorship, or corrupt bureaucratism like Japan's LDP regime.
And working-class pressure today can "inflect" the way capitalist governments execute their new philosophy, just as in other days it "inflected" the way they executed their old philosophy.
But the way out is to overthrow capitalist government, new or old, and replace it by workers' government dedicated to social provision and democracy.
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Who interviewed Digby Jones?
Digby Jones's comment came in an interview in the Financial Times, conducted by FT business editor John Willman.
The story of John Willman tells you nearly as much about the evolution of the "1968 left" as Jones's comment tells you about the evolution of capitalist government.
My last meeting with John Willman was in a pub near Kings Cross in the mid 1970s. He was a member of, or just expelled from, IS (forerunner of the SWP), and sympathetic to the "Right Opposition" which was expelled in 1973 and then gradually mutated in a bewildering variety of political strands: RCG, Living Marxism, The Chartist, the "Discussion Group", etc.
I spent an evening trying to persuade John Willman that the Right Opposition's "big idea" - that the main job of Marxists was to stop "the militants" running too far ahead of "the masses" - was paralysing and conservative. I remember writing him a long letter on the subject too.
I didn't succeed, and John Willman spiralled out of our orbit. I couldn't tell you his exact itinerary. I suspect he didn't move to the right in some sudden overnight conversion, but rather drifted. He was General Secretary of the Fabian Society for a number of years - no risk of running too far ahead of "the masses" there! - and after that he worked for the Financial Times in more junior posts before reaching his present heights.
Martin Thomas