Labour need to stand against the tyranny of big corporate power as well as dictatorial presidents

One of the biggest political issues of the 1680s was how England should trade with Asia.

Should our newly commercialising nation let merchants buy and sell as they pleased, doing deals with Indian emperors and traders on an equal footing? Or did we need to restrict English access to one big corporation, backed up by the power of the state, able to use violence to defeat its competitors.

In the 1680s, the monopolists bribed the king and won the argument. The same has happened time and again since. The result is that imperial war and militaristic violence have had too strong a presence in our history.

But the idea of Britain as a nation of free-traders, hostile to big corporate power, supporting every peoples’ capacity to govern themselves has been a powerful minority tradition in our politics since at least the 1680s. It is that tradition which should inform Labour’s approach to Britain’s place in the world now.

The greatest tragedy in Labour’s recent past history is the limited scope of thinking about Britain’s place in the world. Yes, we have discussions about particular moments and specific policies. But the centre-left in Britain has failed to challenge the terms of the debate for at least forty years. Our failure to offer an alternative is one reason the world is in such a mess now.

Because, let’s be clear: the world as it is, with its massive concentrations of wealth, its sink-or-swim global markets and worldwide instability was created by the ideas and arguments of our political opponents.

As historian James Cronin argues in his new book Global Rules. America, Britain, and a Disordered Worlds, the Anglo-American right responded to the global meltdown of the 1970s by remoulding the global order in its own image. That order was based on the strengthening of ‘western’ power to open up markets for big corporate capital. Unevenly and sporadically, it tried to impose its particular version of democracy and human rights across the world. For Cronin, there was nothing new about George W Bush’s worldwide designs.

Our present-day hyper-liberal vision of Europe, with the single market at its heart, was partly the creation of this Anglo-American right. It is ironic the Tory right now wants to leave the club they created.

This right-wing Anglo-American vision of global order came crashing down in the chaos of Iraq and the global financial crisis. The left’s failure to challenge with a different story has allowed it to be revived in a shrunken form in recent discussion about the ‘Anglosphere’, which Nick Pierce and Mike Kenny recently discussed in the New Statesman. The Anglo-American right no longer seriously think it can impose its authority on the rest of the world. Instead, it wants to retreat into closer cooperation between countries that speak English and, supposedly, share the same values.

Where should we begin with an alternative, more optimistic vision of Britain’s place in the world? To start with, Labour needs to avoid an obvious trap: Europe. There is nothing intrinsically good or bad about the EU. Championing it in contrast to Anglo-American capitalism now makes it too easy to characterise us as the defenders of bureaucracy against freedom.

But it also lets us forget that the EU as it is now was designed to do the same things as Reagan and Thatcher’s Anglo-American alliance– increase the flow of capital and labour beyond democratic control, place the interests of finance before industry, undermine the particularity of local cultures in the name of standardisation and homogeneity. We should stay in to change it. But Europe shouldn’t be the centre of our global strategy.

Instead, I think Labour should reclaim free trade and self-government from the right. Our politics should be driven by voracious opposition to any concentration of money and power overseas as well as at home.

That means we should fiercely resist the idea that only the English speaking peoples understand democracy or self-rule. We should back democratic institutions that let people govern themselves, nation by nation, town by town, to the limits of our capacity. That means no deals with tyrants, however they might be in the interests of British capital.

But we need to stand against the tyranny of big corporate power as much as dictatorial presidents. We should support efforts by workers and small traders to fight big corporate monopolies. Fair Trade is one such strategy.

Britain should be proud to be called a nation of shop-keepers, but we need to make sure that doesn’t turn us into being a society of bloated bankers.

What does that mean in practice? My point is to try to start the debate not offer all the answers. But let me suggest four ideas.

First, Labour needs to expose and confront the use of state sovereignty to back the super-rich and big corporate power. It could begin by leading the fight against tax havens, starting by shutting down our own. Our inaction during 13 years in power is a stain on our record and needs to be redeemed by action now.

Second, we need to redirect overseas aid to help institutions that foster self-government. Apart from disaster relief, we shouldn’t spend aid on anything else. Women’s education, respect for human rights, better skilled workforces – these will all come if people have democratic power in their own hands. We could make a good start by funding support for free and independent trade unions in places where they don’t exist now.

Third, and most difficult. We need to reorient Britain’s own global ‘trade’ away from finance and the City of London. At the moment, London is the epicentre of the wrong sort of globalisation, with a sector still interested in short-term financial returns not long-term productive growth. We need to change that. It’ll be difficult, but it won’t happen unless we restrict the inflow of overseas capital into non-productive activities. I’d start by banning non-EU investment in British property.

In all this, we are returning to moments in our own party’s own past – Labour as a force opposing militarism and protectionism, fighting for democracy, free trade, a force with a clear vision of a world of self-governing peoples.

We could begin by celebrating those moments. One of the proudest for me when George Lansbury presented a bill to the House of Commons that would have given India a democratic constitution in December 1925. Let’s make a big fuss when the anniversary of that moment comes round in eight months time.