Can Labour be pro-business and pro-worker?

Pfizer’s bid for its British rival AstraZeneca demonstrates why Labour’s One Nation policy is desperately needed. It goes right to the heart of the problem in our politics, which is that the Government no longer has any real power in relation to money managers, media moguls and bankers.

The rich lay down the law and the job of politics is reduced to explaining to people that there is no alternative.

A strong response could give ‘one nation’ genuine meaning and clarity, rather than a few well meaning phrases about responsibility and the longer-term view.  It is not only state power which centralises, but also capital.

We are living in the age of the oligarchs, and I’m not talking about Russia, I’m talking about our country. Britain.

There are six energy providers, six phone companies and six banks. Thirty years ago there were more than two hundred. This isn’t competition, its oligopoly.  Cartel capitalism.  Left to itself, capital centralises and concentrates power. Don’t believe me? Read Thomas Piketty’s new book “Capital in the twenty first Century”.

The City of London is where the power lies, not the city of Westminster.The City of London Corporation even has an officer who has a VIP seat in Parliament. He has a title. They call him the “Remembrancer”.

A UK with renewed national purpose, requires an industrial strategy that protects the long term interests and value of British business from predatory control. We’ve already suffered the catastrophe of Kraft’s hostile take-over of Cadbury. The pursuit of our leading pharma company by US Pfizer is yet another example of a great British asset under threat of subordination to debt-financed control. And against the wishes of the board, researchers and scientists, the workforce and the region.

We know what we should do.

We should project the long-term policy of promoting value in the British economy by asserting that the takeover is not in the interests of the company, though it will lead to short term benefits for speculators and ‘super managers’, as Piketty describes them.

Chuka Umuna was absolutely right when he said “We must [back] our winning sectors with such ferocity that companies like Pfizer are clamouring to invest in Britain” but when he is Secretary of State for Business, we should give him the powers to intervene in takeovers, if they are against the long term interests of the company or the country. And as Maurice Glasman has eloquently argued, isn’t it time we allowed the workforce, who make these companies great, to have seats on the board, to keep things honest and guard against corrupt dealing?

There should be a partnership with Government to protect long-term assets from being monetised and dissolved.

This is a moment to assert our vision of a common good between government and business, between business and workers, between research and enterprise.  We need to embed AstraZeneca in the regional development of the British economy that rewards long term investment, not just an immediate hit.

The malaise of present politics is that workers feel that the political class is not on their side and we’re all the same. They’re giving up on us because they think we’re giving up on them. And the irony is that UKIP, who believe there should be fewer worker protections and would be happy for rampant speculators to seize control of companies like AstraZeneca, are taking the lead. The idea of Labour not coming first in the European elections, a year before the General Election, makes me shudder.

I hear too often in party meetings and union branches that our party has been captured by the vested interests of the City. It’s an unfair characterisation and it doesn’t have to be this way.  We need to impress that we are on the side of British workers and British firms and not exclusively of the City of London.

We’re pro-business and pro-worker. That really is a ‘one nation’ message that can unite us.