VW is further evidence that global business has become a law unto itself

Will Hutton in The Guardian

A well-functioning capitalism has, and will always need, multiple and powerfully embedded checks and balances – not just on its conduct but on how it defines its purpose. Sometimes those checks are strong, uncompromised unions; sometimes tough regulation; sometimes rigorous external shareholders; sometimes independent non-executive directors and sometimes demanding, empowered consumers. Or a combination of all of the above.

CEOs, company boards and their cheerleaders in a culture which so uncritically wants to be pro-business do not welcome any of this: checks and balances get in the way of “wealth generation”. They are dismissed as the work of liberal interferers and apostles of the nanny state.

Germany’s economy has been a good example of how checks and balances work well. But the existential crisis at Volkswagen following its systematic cheating of US regulators over dangerous diesel exhaust emissions shows that any society or company forgets the truth at its peril.

Volkswagen abused the system of which it was part. It became an autocratic fiefdom in which environmental sustainability took second place to production – an approach apparently backed by the majority family shareholder, with no independent scrutiny by other shareholders, regulators, directors or consumers. Even its unions became co-opted to the cause. Worse, the insiders at the top paid themselves, ever more disproportionately, in bonuses linked to metrics that advanced the fiefdom’s interests. But they never had to answer tough questions about whether the fiefdom was on the right track. The capacity to ignore views other than your own, no external sanction and the temptation for boundless self-enrichment can emerge in any capitalism – and when they do the result is toxic. VW, facing astounding fines and costs, may pay with its very existence.

So why did a company with a great brand, passionate belief in engineering excellence and commitment to building great cars knowingly game the American regulatory system, to suppress measured emissions of nitrogen dioxide to a phenomenal degree? Plainly, there were commercial and production benefits. It could thus sell the diesel engines it manufactured for Europe in the much tougher regulatory environment – at least for diesel – of the US and challenge Toyota as the world’s largest car manufacturer. Directors, with their bonuses geared to growth, employment and profits, could become very rich indeed.
Nor did the risks seem so outlandish. It was an open secret that car emission tests are artificial constructs, with special tyres, lubricants and measures to reduce car weight and air drag all allowed with the connivance of the regulators. To create a special piece of software that closed down nitrogen dioxide emissions during a test must have seemed to the executives involved only an extension of this artificiality. In any case, regulations are for busybodies, especially in areas as controversial as climate change and air quality. The software ruse was merely taking the game of cat and mouse between regulator and car maker to another level.

Former CEO Martin Winterkorn, who resigned last week over the scandal, claims he knew nothing of what was going on, blaming a few unnamed executives for making a catastrophic error of judgment. Winterkorn was the consummate German engineer, knowing every dimension of engine performance; if he did not know how the dirty diesel engines of some popular VW brands were successfully passing US emission tests it was only because he chose not to ask. He did not need to. He had the backing of the Porsche family, who own just over 50% per cent of VW’s shares and who agree to vote as a block; the support too of the state of Saxony with a further 20% per cent –and of union members on the supervisory board. Winterkorn could run a company of 600,000, as Süddeutsche Zeitungremarked, as if it were North Korea.

VW is about production and jobs which trumps concerns about environmental sustainability – a culture than unites unions as much as the Porsche family. And Winterkorn was its standardbearer, leading the charge against the tightening of EU emission regulations – urging weaker targets and a longer timetable. Despite a vast R and D budget, VW is far from a leader in the electrical car or hybrid market. Mr Winterkorn’s bonuses were based on his capacity to deliver production, jobs and profits: environmental sustainability or engaging with wider stakeholders did not get a look-in.

Make your god the share price, as so many British and US companies do, and you create one basket of problems – under-investment, excess deal-making and cutting corners. Abuse the stakeholder system, as did VW, and make your god production on any terms, damning the concerns of outsiders as irrelevant, and your end can be equally grisly. Capitalism, in short, may have boundless creative and innovative energy – but it also has boundless ways to go wrong. Intriguingly, recent work by a group of researchers at Harvard and the London Business School compared 90 American companies that took sustainability seriously with 90 who did not. Over 18 years the 90 committed to sustainability delivered annual financial returns 4.8% higher than the other 90.

In order to deliver sustainability they had to organise themselves around a core purpose, and then embed checks and balances to keep themselves honest. They shaped the way they were governed to open up to outside stakeholders with whom they checked their strategy. Their reporting measures embraced many metrics beyond share price and they rewarded directors for meeting them. Sustainability was a route to more open governance and rounded strategy – and it delivered.

VW did not believe in this any more than the British government does, now steadily rolling back “green crap” and efforts to promote sustainability as “anti-enterprise”. Transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin, under fire for doing nothing when he was sent the same damning report as the Americans 11 months ago, will have known that in Tory terms there would be no rewards for being cast as a bleeding-heart green. Enterprise is about getting regulators off car-makers’ backs and disempowering meddling stakeholders, especially trade unions.

Yet nor is it right in Corbynesque style to damn capitalism with a reflex call for stronger unions and public ownership. The government of Saxony and union members of VW’s supervisory board proved ineffective whistleblowers. They were not sufficiently interested in human betterment or the fatal consequences of excess nitrogen dioxide emissions. They just wanted jobs at any cost. Checks and balances alone don’t work: they have to be animated by an honest acceptance of mutual responsibility between firms and society – a moral ethic that must inform unions, regulators, shareholders and systems of corporate governance alike. VW lost the plot. But so, in a more profound way, have both the apologists and critics of western capitalism.

Bomb both sides in Syria and we’ll fix the country in a jiffy

We could also bomb Hell, and within a month the residents would say ‘We were better off under Satan’

Mark Steel in The Independent


Some people get confused by events in Syria, but they’re not that complicated. Quite simply, we need to bomb somewhere or other out there, like we should have done two years ago. Back then we should have dropped bombs to support the Isis rebels fighting against the evil Assad. But as we didn’t bother, we now need to put that right by bombing the Isis rebels, and protecting Assad.

Because if only we had bombed Assad back then, it would be much easier to bomb Isis and their allies now, as we would be one of their allies so we could bomb ourselves. And we could do that without the fuss of going all the way to Syria, which would cut down on carbon emissions as well.

Also, we could ask Isis if they had any bombs left over that we had given them, “as we need them back to bomb you please”.

The change has happened because back then, you may recall, Assad was so unspeakably evil he had gassed his own people. But now we have decided we support Assad so I suppose we have found out the gas wasn’t so much a chemical weapon as a Syrian version of Febreze, that has left Aleppo with an alluring scent of lemon.

Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned against bombing, saying “Syria is not Libya, it won’t implode but explode beyond its borders.” So that might not be too cheery, if he is saying things will not necessarily go as smoothly as they have turned out in Libya.

If you were really fussy, you could look for another example of a western invasion in the Syria/Iraq region in the recent past, and find out how well that went. But where we went wrong in Libya and Iraq, is we only bombed one side.

This is the sort of pacifist behaviour that causes the trouble. We should have bombed all the different sides, to make sure we annihilate the right people.

Sometimes we have tried this to a certain extent, so at different times we have armed Assad and Gaddafi and Saddam and Bin Laden and then bombed them for using the bombs we had sold them. But it is not organised properly and leaves the poor sods confused.

Instead of supporting Arab dictators for 20 years, then opposing them for three, and then supporting them again, we should arrange it on a rota system. We could bomb them on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, bomb their opponents on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and leave Sundays for US construction companies to make some money rebuilding the stuff we have bombed, so there is something new to bomb.

Otherwise we are left with the predicament Tony Blair finds himself in. He complains that we didn’t bomb Assad two years ago. But, in 2002, Blair invited Assad to stay at Buckingham Palace and praised his modernising outlook. If he had used my suggested system, he could have grovelled to him on Thursday, then bombed him in his bedroom on Friday. I’m sure the Queen wouldn’t have minded sleeping on a mate’s settee for a couple of weeks while builders repaired the damage.

The silly thing is, it’s now claimed there are secret units of the IRA – who have kept their weapons against the rules of the peace process. It would have kept them out of mischief if they had been asked to bomb Blair’s pals such as Assad and Gaddafi, as long as they did it on one of the agreed days, and it would have strengthened the Northern Ireland peace process as well.

There could also be a surprise element to which side we bomb, with vast commercial potential. Instead of the same predictable places popping up, there should be an international body that chooses the venue, with Sepp Blatter opening an envelope to reveal “next year the place we have to bomb as we can’t just do nothing is… Finland”.

Then, whenever someone suggests bombing Finland will make things worse, columnists and politicians and blokes in pubs can shout “well, we can’t do NOTHING”.

This argument, that we can’t do NOTHING, is powerful and well thought through, because it’s clear from Western military interventions in the Middle East that no matter how bad the situation is before we go there, we manage to make it worse. This must have taken immense planning in Libya, but was worth it because everyone seems to agree that most of the country looks back on their days under the foul, despotic, murderous tyranny of Gaddafi with a dreamy nostalgic affection.

We could bomb Hell, and within a month the residents would say “We were better off under Satan. At least he kept the demons under some sort of control.”

Maybe the problem is we are not entirely trusted. This goes to show what a touchy people they are out there. We do all we can to support the spread of democracy by arming the royal family of Saudi Arabia and the Amir of Kuwait and the honourable folk who rule Qatar, and go out of our way to support people with titles such as “Mighty Wizard of Eternal Vengeance and Holy uber-King who can make up laws as he goes along, Divinely Grand Swisher of the Majestic Whip and his Million Wives of Bahrain”, and the little sods still doubt our honourable intentions.

But now there is an even more urgent reason to back the bombing of somewhere or other, which is we must do it for the refugees. The Sun newspaper, in particular, has been running a campaign that we “Do it for Aylan”, the three-year-old lad who was drowned as his family fled from the horrors of Isis.

I suppose they must have spoken to Aylan’s family, who would have told The Sun that bombing somewhere or other is exactly what he would have wanted.

The Volkswagen scandal reveals the corruption of the Left's regulation dreamworld

Liberal, competitive capitalism is the opposite of the law of the jungle because it depends on rules. Those who transgress must be swiftly punished.


Allister Heath in The Telegraph


If I were Jeremy Corbyn, I would be thanking my lucky stars for the scandal that threatens to engulf parts of the car industry. Nothing is more guaranteed to galvanise the Left-wing cause than a corporate conspiracy – and the VW diesel affair, which reads like the script of a Hollywood movie, ticks all of the boxes. Lies, secret computer technology programmed to fool the authorities, a deliberate breach of environmental regulations by a rapacious corporation: it’s all there, and crying out for the full George Clooney treatment.

Fortunately, this latest blow to the reputation of big business won’t be enough to rescue the doomed Labour leader. But those of us who support capitalism must lead condemnations of VW’s egregious behaviour, and explain clearly that a functioning free market implies a scrupulous adherence to the rule of law.

What is most damning about this scandal is that an almost identical deception had already been uncovered. In October 1998 the US Department of Justice and Environmental Protection Agency fined seven heavy-duty diesel engine makers for equipping their engines with an older version of “defeat devices” – just like in the VW scandal, software designed to detect and trick the official tests. The automotive industry must be forced to change its ways. It must become truly transparent, and there needs to be a crackdown on abuse.

It is vital that free-marketers explain again and again that proper liberal, competitive capitalism is the exact opposite of the law of the jungle or of a Hobbesian free for all: it is a remarkably disciplined system. Individuals are encouraged to pursue their self-interest; but unlike in a kleptocracy, they can’t force anybody to trade with them and must respect the sanctity of private property rights, contracts and the legal system.

It doesn’t matter how big your company is or how rich you are: a pledge must be met; a product must deliver what it says on the tin; lies are never acceptable. Breaking the law must lead to pitiless prosecution; and selling customers a pup must result in litigation and thorough compensation.

Free markets are at once realistic about human nature – unlike naive Leftyism, they don’t assume that people are altruistic or self-policing – and civilising, in that they force people to adhere to strict norms of behaviour. As Milton Friedman put it in his famous libertarian theory of business ethics: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business ... to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

There will always be dishonesty, in all walks of life, in every industry and profession, in the public and private sector and in all economic and social systems. Yet humanity’s inherent fallibility, and the need for eternal vigilance, doesn’t invalidate the fact that free markets are the best possible system to create wealth and prosperity for all.

But while corporate scandals always force the political right onto the defensive, this particular story is just as bad, if not worse, for the Left-wing world-view. It shreds many of its favourite assumptions, highlights endless government and political failures and mercilessly exposes the flaws at the heart of the ridiculous virtue-signalling that has passed for environmental policy in recent years.

Take the nonsensical claim that the City of London is a cesspool of iniquity, home to a uniquely amoral tribe of adrenalin-junkies willing to lie and cheat whenever bending the rules is deemed to be a gamble worth taking. The truth is that no industry can claim moral superiority, and all are blighted by a tiny minority of rogues: even old-fashioned manufacturers in the supposedly gentler, law abiding industrial capitals of Old Europe can and do commit fraud, taking insane risks to pull the wool over regulators’ eyes. The anti-London euro-enthusiasts were wrong, once again.

Or consider another Left-wing shibboleth: the idea that Wall Street’s lobbying and influence means that it effectively controls the US political system. Yet the VW scandal reminds us that heavily unionised car manufacturers have traditionally been far better at getting their way, collecting handouts and bailouts and directing legislation. They have convinced politicians, especially in Germany, France and Brussels, to turn a blind eye to indefensible testing practices that would never be tolerated in any other industry.

What must be most galling to the Left is that VW is structured exactly in the way they would love every company to be. It is partly owned by a German state; the remainder of its ownership structure means that it is protected from a hostile takeover; and it has the sort of two-tier board structure beloved of the dafter corporate governance activists, complete with plenty of trade union representation. Yet it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. In the fraud stakes, the Anglo-American model of financial capitalism and the Germanic and Japanese models are one and the same. Once again, the euro-enthusiast belief that everything is always better in Europe has been spectacularly refuted.

Last but not least, the scandal has highlighted the gross hypocrisy of politically correct companies, as well as how the environmental agenda can backfire spectacularly. Industrial firms should be honest: if they don’t like green rules, or believe that meeting them would impose price hikes on their customers, they should say so, not loudly sign up and bask in the moral high ground while surreptitiously ignoring the rules.

As to the embrace of diesel as a supposedly cleaner alternative to petrol, it has been a disaster caused entirely by official error. Desperate to meet Kyoto Treaty carbon dioxide targets, the European Union decided in the late 1990s to bet the bank on diesel. This reduced CO2 but increased emissions of nitrogen dioxide and particulates, an own goal if ever there were one.

The idiocy of the policy, backed by German carmakers, but for which the Eurocrats must bear responsibility, is only now becoming apparent. Nobody emerges from this sorry saga with any credit.

It’s the British establishment that has a problem with democracy

The elite has little time for elections that deliver the wrong results. And Jeremy Corbyn’s was one of them

Seumas Milne in The Guardian


If there were any doubts that the British establishment has a problem with democracy, the last few days should have put them to rest. First there was the drama of the spurned Tory donor and piggate. Unsurprisingly, Michael Ashcroft’s revelation that the prime minister simulated oral sex with a dead pig as part of a student initiation ceremony has been the centre of attention.

The question of whether David Cameron lied about when he knew of the former Conservative treasurer and donor’s continuing non-dom tax status – meaning Ashcroft paid no tax in Britain on his overseas earnings – was dutifully raised by Labour and SNP MPs. Both Ashcroft and the Tories had promised he would take up permanent UK residence when he was given a peerage in 2000.

Revealed: the link between life peerages and party donations

 But the real scandal is that Ashcroft, like so many party donors before him, simply paid up and pocketed his unelected seat in parliament in return. His later argument with Cameron was apparently only about whether a “significant” government job was also included in the package for his £8m of donations. And the evidence suggests Cameron only dropped it because of embarrassment over the “non-dom” deceit.

But it’s not as if Ashcroft’s expectations were at all unreasonable, based on experience. Rewarding major donors with seats in parliament and jobs in government is a long-established British tradition. Statistical analysis has disposed of any vestigial doubt that this exchange is what is still going on. Among many others, John Nash, the venture capitalist with education and health interests, was given a peerage and a job as schools minister in 2013. David Sainsbury was made science minister in Tony Blair’s government after donating millions of pounds to the New Labour. Outrageously, but to no great surprise, government jobs and seats in the legislature are very much tradeable commodities in the mother of parliaments.

The second shaft of light thrown on the contempt for democracy among the British elite appeared at the weekend, when a “senior serving general” in the British army told the Sunday Times that the armed forces would take “direct action” and “mutiny” if Jeremy Corbyn were to become prime minister. “Fair means or foul”, the general reportedly declared, would be used to protect the country’s “security”.

At face value that is a threat of a coup against a future elected government and an attack on national security. Of course, the bluster of one unnamed general against the newly elected Labour leader is a long way from the reality of tanks on the streets, or even military insubordination against elected leaders. And the British military has in any case a long record of suppressing democracy around the world.

But the lack of official and media response to the kind of openly anti-democratic top-brass talk that’s not been heard in Britain since the 1970s – and would be denounced as treasonable anywhere else – is remarkable. The comments by the general were unacceptable and “not helpful”, was the most the Ministry of Defence could manage. Self-evidently, the general should be disciplined. But the government ruled out even an inquiry on the grounds that it would be “almost impossible” to identify the culprit among 100 serving generals.

It’s only necessary to imagine what would happen if a Muslim had threatened “direct action” against elected leaders to grasp the absurdity of the response. Add in the fact that the intelligence services have also said they will “restrict” information to Corbyn “or any of his cabinet” because of the opposition leader’s “detestation of Britain’s security services” – and it’s clear the problem unelected officials have with elected politicians who disagree with them goes far beyond the odd bilious general.

But political corruption and the implacable opposition of the spooks and military to progressive change are the traditional forms of anti-democratic politics, in Britain, as elsewhere. For the past generation it has been the corporate embrace, the revolving doors, the privatised contracts, the “free trade” treaties, European Union directives, and the removal of economics from democratic control under the neoliberal rules of the game that have set the boundaries of acceptable politics.

Since the 2008 crash the rejection of that broken economic model and the hollowed-out politics that reflects it has spread across the western world, now including Britain. Which helps explain why Cameron’s Conservatives have turned to the most retrograde measures to bring opposition to heel.

The most extreme of those is the trade union bill now going through parliament, which will not only effectively outlaw most strikes but will slash trade union funding of the Labour party by erecting an individualised postal hurdle, a form of which was last imposed in the aftermath of the General Strike of 1926. No such obligations will apply, needless to say, to the entirely undemocratic corporate funding of the Tory party.

But establishment resistance to a democratic mandate is also running at a high pitch inside the Labour party itself. The reaction of a string of Labour grandees to Corbyn’s landslide election – including of several of those brought into the new leader’s big-tent shadow cabinet – has been to denounce most of the platform he was elected on.

More than anything else, the established international and security policies of the state, from renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system to support for any and every US military campaign across the Arab and Muslim world, are being treated as red lines out of bounds of democratic debate.

That doesn’t reflect public opinion, let alone the views of Labour’s hugely expanded membership. The only way to bridge the gap between the bulk of Labour MPs, most of whom were selected under a tightly controlled New Labour regime, and the mandate of a leader elected by a runaway majority outside parliament is to give full rein to the party’s own democracy.

That process will start at next week’s Labour conference. But it could be bolstered, and Corbyn’s political authority strengthened, with a referendum of members and affiliated supporters on the main policies he campaigned on, from abolition of tuition fees to public ownership. It’s only by unleashing democracy, inside and outside the Labour party, that the anti-democratic backlash will be overcome.

'We knew we were going to be hit by a tsunami’: John McDonnell Interview

Source The Guardian

John McDonnell arrives with his shirt open at the neck. As the photographer sets up, he says: “I must put a tie on. I want to look respectable.” He rummages in his rucksack and draws out a tie of a very conservative deep blue. As he puts it on, the man who once declared his mission to be “generally fermenting the overthrow of capitalism” jokes: “I’m trying to look more like a central banker.”

This fellow veteran of the Bennite left is Jeremy Corbyn’s closest ally in a shadow cabinet that contains very few true friends of the new Labour leader.

The cartoonish version of his shadow chancellor is a belligerent, divisive, leftwing firebrand. He certainly has a history of incendiary rhetoric and he is unquestionably leftwing. He is not humourless and, if he can be abrasive, today he is doing his best to turn his most emollient face to the world.

He acknowledges that many senior Labour MPs were appalled by his appointment and influential trade union figures urged the Labour leader to make a less contentious choice. The rightwing press have raged against him even more than they have about the election of Corbyn himself. “It was a difficult decision for both him and me” and “we knew we were going to get a tsunami hit us.”

He is a man many love to hate. Why is that? He puts it partly down to “swimming against the tide” for all those decades when his brand of leftwing politics was despised and ignored by successive leaders of the Labour party. He reveals that his wife and family had their doubts about whether he should take it on: he had a mild heart attack two years ago. “I had warnings from them: ‘Come on, look, are you sure?’ But it had to be done.”

After many conversations with Corbyn, they concluded that they had to “ride the controversy” because it was essential that leader and shadow chancellor were as one on economic policy. “We didn’t want to go through a Blair–Brown era again where leader and chancellor are falling out all the time or what went on with Ed [Miliband] and Ed Balls. I think Jeremy’s point of view is ‘I’ve got to have someone who I one hundred percent trust.’ ”

The composition of the rest of the shadow cabinet, he argues, shows that they are not being militantly factional and are genuinely interested in having “a really broad-based team” representing all strands of Labour opinion. “As big a tent as we possibly can.” They started making overtures to people before it was announced that Corbyn had won and he is still appealing to some who quit the shadow cabinet for internal exile on the backbenches. He hopes that they will think again and cooperate on the development of policy. “I’m still having that conversation now with people to see if we can get them back into some role. I think we might be able to.”

Like who? “I would like Chuka [Umunna] to come back, desperately.” He mentions some more of those who have refused to serve. “Shabana Mahmood is a brilliant talent for the future. People like that I’d really like to get back. If we could get them back on board it will send a message that we really are a big tent.”

His friend’s debut week as leader has not been a smooth ride. Even sympathisers have been tearing out their hair over an often shambolic first seven days of unforced errors and forced U-turns which gifted a lot of ammunition to their many enemies in both the press and the Labour parliamentary party. McDonnell acknowledges that it has been “a bit rough” and puts the mistakes down to naivety. Whatever mutinous colleagues say to the contrary, he claims to be completely confident that his friend will lead Labour into the 2020 election.

His own appearance on Question Time involved two apologies. Once for saying that he wished he could have assassinated Margaret Thatcher – “an appalling joke”. And again for a notorious speech in which he commended the bravery and sacrifice of the IRA for using their bombs and bullets to bring “Britain to the negotiating table”. Some of the audience applauded his expression of regret. Others have found his explanation for the IRA speech – that he was praising them to try to sustain the peace process – utterly unconvincing. “I set up the all-party group on conflict prevention and conflict resolution. I chaired it,” he says, but acknowledges: “There’ll be some I’ll never convince.” Part of his problem with presenting himself as one of nature’s peacemakers is that he has a lot of form when it comes to suggesting political opponents should meet violent ends, talking about “lynching the bastard” in reference to the Tory Esther McVey and having “a recurring dream about garrotting Danny Alexander”.

He smiles: “I know.”

Where is that coming from? Liverpool, is his answer. “I’m from the north. You can take the boy out of the north but you can’t take the north out of the boy. I’m a plain speaker.”

Does the mellow version of McDonnell extend to having anything pleasant to say about the man he now shadows, George Osborne? “I’ve tried to get to a situation where you mature, where you don’t personalise your politics. But I go back to my constituency and you should come to my surgery some time, you’d sit down and weep. I have people begging me for a house. I’ve got families living in beds in sheds. Shanty places. So I think Osborne is cut off from the real world. I’m going to challenge him to come down to see them. What angers me is that they don’t have any understanding of the consequences of what they’re doing.”

This promises lively fireworks ahead when he clashes with a Tory chancellor he calls “immoral”. But to opponents within his own party, the message is relentless conciliation. A manifesto he wrote three years ago called for a tax raid on the wealthiest 10%, banning companies from paying their chief executives any more than 20 times the lowest wage, and a new top rate of tax set at 60%. But he says he is not going to dogmatically impose his ideas. What he will instead announce is policy commissions to investigate various areas and he hopes for participation from a wide range of opinion not just confined to the Labour party.

He wants to change the Bank of England’s target so that it considers not just inflation when setting interest rates, but also the effect on jobs, investment and inequality. One of his biggest and most hotly contested ideas is forcing the bank to print money to fund infrastructure projects: so-called “people’s quantitative easing”. The governor of the bank, Mark Carney, has suggested that this would so compromise its independence that he could not remain as its governor. Rather than upbraid Carney for straying into political partisanship, McDonnell mildly responds that he is “going to try to meet him as soon as possible”.

For the first time in many decades, Labour has a shadow chancellor committed to the nationalisation of some strategic industries. Polls suggest that taking the railways back into state control is popular with a majority. He is likely also to strike a chord when he describes the recent sales of shares in chunks of the Royal Mail and Royal Bank of Scotland as “complete rip-offs” that have left the taxpayer seriously short-changed.

What is perhaps most interesting in terms of his personal ideological development and the way in which debate has shifted over the decades is that he no longer advocates, as the left did back in the 1980s, a return to nationalisation across the board. BT was once a state company. Would he seek to bring it back into public ownership again? “Too late,” he says. “Love to but too late.”

Lack of voter faith in Labour’s economic competence lay at the heart of the party’s defeat back in May as it also did when they were thrown out of office in 2010. If the public did not trust Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling with the economy, nor Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, why are they going to trust Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell?

“They’re not going to have to trust me or Jeremy Corbyn or whatever. They’re going to have to trust the Labour party.”

He says he wants the membership, which grew during the leadership contest and has drawn in more Corbyn enthusiasts since the result, to get involved in policy making. This also hints at how he and Corbyn think they can mobilise support in the party as a counterweight to the hostility of the great majority of Labour MPs.

“We’ll go on the stump immediately after the party conference, get as many members out there as possible, in the same way that Jeremy went on the stump before. But the difference now will be not urging people to vote for us, it’ll be about urging people to get involved in the discussion. I think Labour MPs will be shocked at the way in which they will be engaged in a democratic process of determining our policies.”

His admirers say McDonnell is a serious thinker about a radically different way of approaching the economy. Asked which writers have most influenced him, he rattles off several names of contemporary, leftwing economists, but at the top of his list he places Karl Marx. ‘You can’t understand the capitalist system without reading Das Kapital. Full stop.’

He says this with a knowing twinkle. That is not an answer you would have got from any previous Labour shadow chancellor in living memory. Nor from any central banker.

The Guardian's pessimistic take on Corbyn let our readers down

Ed Vulliamy in The Guardian

For many of our readers and potential readers, the Labour leadership result was a singular moment of hope, even euphoria. It was the first time many of our young readers felt anything like relevance to, let alone empowerment within, a political system that has alienated them utterly.

The Observer – a broad church, to which I’m doggedly loyal – responded to Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide with an editorial foreseeing inevitable failure at a general election of the mandate on which he won. For what it’s worth, I felt we let down many readers and others by not embracing at least the spirit of the result, propelled as it was by moral principles of equality, peace and justice. These are no longer tap-room dreams but belong to a mass movement in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe.

It came as a disappointment – as I suspect it did to others who supported Corbyn, or were interested – to find such a consensus ready to pour cold water on the parade. To behold so little curiosity towards, let alone sympathy with, why this happened.

Of course the rest of the media were in on the offensive. Our sister paper the Guardian had endorsed a candidate who lost, humiliated; the Tory press barons performed to script. Here was a chance for the Observer to stand out from the crowd. But instead, we conjoined the chorus with our own – admittedly more progressive – version of this obsession with electoral strategy with little regard to what Corbyn says about the principles of justice, peace and equality (or less inequality). It came across as churlish, I’m sure, to many readers on a rare day of something different.

I accept that we are a reformist paper, and within those parameters one has to get elected. But that should not mean a digging-in by, and with, the parliamentary inside-baseball Labour party whose days and ways of presenting politics like corporate management selling a product (or explaining a product fault) have just been soundly rejected by its membership. Why embed with MPs in a parliament no one trusts against the democratic vote outside it?

And anyway, what if? Who, five years ago, would have predicted Syriza’s victory in Greece or bet on Podemos taking Madrid and Barcelona, now preparing for a role in government? It’s not as though the Observer’s accumulated editorials disagree that much with Corbyn.

During Ed Miliband’s Labour, the Observer robustly questioned the health of capitalism – our columnist Will Hutton calls it “turbo-capitalism”. We urged support for a living wage and the working poor, and the likes of Robert Reich and David Simon have filled our pages with more radical critiques of capitalism than Corbyn’s.

Anyway, how much of what Corbyn argues do most voters disagree with, if they stop to think? Do people approve of bewildering, high tariffs set by the cartel of energy companies, while thousands of elderly people die each winter of cold-related diseases? Do students and parents from middle- and low-income families want tuition fees?

Do people like paying ludicrous fares for signal-failure, delays and overcrowding on inept railways? Do people urge tax evasion by multinationals and billionaires, which they then subsidise with cuts to the NHS? Post-cold war, who exactly are we supposed to kill en masse with these expensive nuclear missiles? What’s so good about the things Corbyn wants to drastically change?

Even more fundamental is the appeal to principle and morality – peace, justice and internationalism – which drove the Labour grassroots vote, and was spoken at the rally for refugees which Corbyn made his first engagement and for which this newspaper stands absolutely. Why not embrace those principles, or at least show an interest in the fact that hundreds of thousands of people just did? Which better reflects the Britain we want: Corbyn’s “open your hearts” or Cameron’s “swarm”?

The parliamentary bubble – and our editorial – calculate that we cannot fundamentally change Britain on the basis of these aspirations, even if many people yearn to. In the acceptance speech, Corbyn should have appealed beyond the party in which he is steeped; perhaps he too inhabits a different echo-chamber.

But this isn’t about Corbyn, it’s about why he’s suddenly there. And what an appalling lesson to draw: someone is overwhelmingly elected to falteringly but seriously challenge that stasis and order of things – by urging peace, justice, republic and equality – only to be evicted by the deep system into a lethal ice-storm the moment he leaves the tent, like Captain Oates, though not of his own volition.

And even if middle England is more adverse to radical politics than middle Spain or Greece, does that mean we have to align with this mainstream stasis, just because it is so? What’s the point of principles if their trade-off for power is a principle in itself? Why have principles at all?

The legal philosopher Costas Douzinas argues for a separation of words: using “politics” to describe horse-trading between parties, which feign differences but actually agree, and “the political” to describe antagonisms that really exist in society. On that basis, why start with the stasis of “politics” to approach “the political”, rather than the reverse: invoke “the political” to challenge the stasis of “politics”? Especially alongside Greece, Spain and elsewhere.

Instead of a stirring leader, which did not have to endorse Corbyn but could celebrate the spirit of the vote along with those who delivered it, we’ve left a lot of good, loyal and decent people who read our newspaper feeling betrayed.

“There’s something happening in here / What it is ain’t exactly clear”, wrote Stephen Stills in 1967. It’s a good description of where we are with all this – we don’t as yet have the map whence this came, where it’s going or even what it is.

Dave Crosby sang: “Don’t try to get yourself elected” (from a mighty number called “Long Time Gone”). Along with almost half this country, I was inclined to agree, but Corbyn’s election throws Crosby’s dictum into question, just as to cut Corbyn down would prove Crosby right. “We can change the world” sang Graham Nash. But are we only allowed to try if middle England, the media and parliament try too?

Jeremy Corbyn won't stop until everyone in Britain is offended

Mark Steel in The Independent


As he’s been leader for five days now, the press are calming down a bit. By tomorrow headlines will only say things like, “Cor-Bin Laden will force pets to be Muslim”, followed by an interview with 89-year-old Vera, who says: “It’s not fair because my hamster’s scared of burqas. That’s the last time I’ll vote Labour.”

The Telegraph will be even more measured, reporting: “Corbyn plans to introduce women-only gravity. Men will be left to float through space, making it harder to arrive on time for work, costing Britain £40bn.”

This could go alongside the genuine report in The Times on Monday, that Jeremy Corbyn’s neighbours “often see him riding a Chairman Mao-style bicycle”. A less thorough reporter might only mention that he rides a bicycle. Luckily this one knew the country where lots of bicycles are ridden is China, which was once ruled by Chairman Mao, which means Corbyn is planning to force us all to work in rice fields and eat dogs.

One problem with this excitement is that it’s hard to increase the hysteria when they’ve gone so wild in the first week, but they’ll rise to the challenge. By November, we’ll be told he’s forced Mary Berry to eat an Arctic roll full of blackbird sick as revenge for selling her book about scones via corporate tax-avoiders Amazon.

Then Panorama will reveal Corbyn appeared at a conference with Satan, who he described as an “old pal”; the evidence is a dream their informant had after falling asleep in a cowshed after drinking a bottle and a half of Sambuca.

You could tell how chaotic his leadership would be from the start, when he gave some important jobs in his party to people he agrees with. This provoked outrage. If he was being inclusive, instead of appointing John McDonnell as shadow chancellor, he’d have given the job to Jeremy Clarkson.

The other complaint about his Shadow Cabinet was the low number of women appointed, only 16 out of 31 rather than the half he promised.

The Sun complained of an “equality blunder”, and you can understand their frustration as they’ve always been uncompromising with their feminist demands, devoting every day’s Page 3 to poems by Mexican women’s rights campaigners, no matter how strong the protests to stop.

He didn’t even give a job to Yvette Cooper, on the grounds that she’d said she wouldn’t take it. But if he really cared about women’s equality, he’d have said “you’ll do whatever job I bloody well give you, love”, and the problem would be solved.

But none of us can have guessed the unspeakable horror to come next, when he didn’t sing the national anthem at a Battle of Britain memorial, ruining the efforts of everyone who fought in the Second World War. Commentators told us: “Those pilots did more than anyone to stop Hitler, and now Jeremy Corbyn has literally opened the cockpit of every Spitfire and smeared dog mess on the seats.”

It’s no wonder people called phone-in shows to make comments such as “I’ve taught myself to snore the national anthem, so I don’t insult the pilots during my sleep.”

It’s understandable for people to see it as an insult when someone didn’t sing “God Save the Queen” at the memorial, because the Queen played a major part in the battle, as a wing commander who shot down five enemy aircraft over Folkestone.

Even so, it’s hard to see how the national anthem is the song that most directly commemorates the RAF, so one suggestion to avoid a similar incident in future is to sing a different song at each memorial. Next year it could be “The Omen” by The Prodigy. Anyone not joining in by screaming “The writing’s on the wall” in St Paul’s cathedral will be arrested for treason.

Once again it was The Sun that seemed most furious about this lack of respect for dead servicemen. But if Corbyn gets his way it won’t even be possible to insult the armed forces, because, according to The Sun, he’ll “abolish the army”.

It didn’t make clear how he’d do that, especially when he appears at Prime Ministers’ Questions seeming mild and reasonable, reading out questions sent in from around the country. Most people seem to feel this was a healthy change, though it may be even better if he puts all the questions in a bucket and draws them out at random.

This would strengthen our democracy further. “Prime Minister, Tina from Exeter asks, who would win in a fight between Godzilla and a giant tarantula?” At first, Cameron would insist the mutant spider had no chance against a seasoned monster with wide experience of destruction, and his front bench would yell “hear hear hear” as usual. But eventually a calmer atmosphere would prevail, and Parliament would become a forum for reasonable debate. That’s when Corbyn will strike to abolish the army.

He’ll introduce a similar system, so instead of weapons, our soldiers will march to the front line of a battle, and call out to the enemy: “Alan from Doncaster has asked what are you going to do about all the fires in the city you’ve just demolished.” Then in 50 years’ time, when there’s a memorial for all our troops that are captured, he won’t even sing at it.

That’s how much of a danger he is.