Open your eyes, Labour is more radically left than it’s ever been

When something new happens in politics, people like to pretend they’ve seen it before.

Look at Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. In the City, lazy thinking about Labour is everywhere.

Pub bores, from Leadenhall to Limehouse, will tell you that Corbyn’s party today is a just bad Betamax video of a 1970s-era Labour government.

This is neon-lit nonsense. This Labour leadership is too left-wing for those 70s governments. For the first time in its history, Labour has become a socialist party, not just a party with some socialists in it.

Labour is planning a radical venture to reinvent Britain from the bright-red Bennite left. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell has no doubt: “Our aim [is] to bring about an irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people.” Try to imagine Tony Blair saying that – and feel the smack of new thinking.

The party intends to overturn the Thatcherite consensus (privatisation, council house sell-offs, tax cuts) and redistribute wealth and power to the workers. Whether or not we agree with the project, we must recognise that it is a profound break with the past.

Consider Labour’s programme, developed while the Conservatives broil in Brexit turmoil.

Companies with over 250 employees will be forced to transfer 10 per cent of their shares to an inclusive ownership fund (“IOF”), owned by their workers. The IOF will pay capped dividends to workers and the surplus to the government.

A proposed “English Sovereign Land Trust” will compulsorily acquire the land banks of big developers – at much reduced prices – for social housing.

Water, energy, rail and the Royal Mail will be nationalised.

Together, these plans would potentially be the biggest shift in ownership and wealth ever attempted by a British government.

As part of this revolution, worker control and employment rights will be massively expanded. Trade union recognition will be made universal, and everyone will get employment rights from day one. Companies will face an “excessive pay levy” if they pay their staff too much – the new windfall tax.

These are not the reformist industrial policies of previous Labour governments. Even in 1945, the industries that Labour was nationalising were still under wartime government direction and often already part publicly-owned. Many of these nationalised industries went on much as before – “same bosses, different hats”, as Clement Attlee accepted.

Today’s Labour party is proposing something far more radical. Nationalisation from the shop floor up was one of Tony Benn’s dreams, and his ideological disciples are now on the verge of attempting it.

Labour’s far-left wing has risen from the “sealed tomb”, where Peter Mandelson hoped to suffocate it, and is neck-and-neck with the Conservatives.

These people could soon be running the country. The City – and UK business nationally – should recognise this. Refusing to engage with a party that is potentially so close to power, and which has such a dramatic policy platform, is not an option.

Business urgently needs a dialogue with Labour, both to argue for a rethink of some of the most damaging policies, and to engage positively where the party’s objectives make sense, such as with opportunities in social housing, infrastructure, and regional development.

The right must also respond to Labour, not with nostalgic name-calling, but with a proper policy agenda. Some politicians from the right are trying to develop new strategies to address inequality, but not enough – the country needs a full range of well-developed political ideas to choose from.

Most of all, it is time to accept political reality. We must end the mood of denial and complacency which is preventing too many in the business community from seeing this radical new Labour party for what it is: the potential government-in-waiting.