How the British left should seize this moment to strip finance of its political clout

In 1977, Nicholas Ridley, a Tory MP in Margaret Thatcher's government, wrote The Ridley Plan, a kind of shock doctrine manual that the Thatcher government followed in its program of mass-privatisations, attacks on trade unions, and the "stealth" privatisation of the NHS.

The Ridley Plan counselled a staged and escalating set of attacks that would start with soft targets and work its way up to the deployment of "a large, mobile squad of police" to put down strikes that the escalations would eventually provoke.

Writing in Opendemocracy, Christine Berry says that the left is on the brink of a similar opportunity to the one seized by Thatcher in 1977: if the coming elections put Labour in power this December, they will be assuming power in the midst of a crisis that is simply too good to waste, brought on by a decade of Tory austerity, oligarchic policies, and the Brexit debacle.

Berry lays out a programme for taking on the UK's powerful finance sector, as a key stage in larger reforms that would otherwise be endangered by the lobbying might of the City of London. As she points out, the right time to do this was after the 2008 crisis, but the neoliberal wing of Labour refused to use that moment, instead handing out billions to finance without any kerbs or democratic oversight of the industry that had just blown up the world's economy. Ten years later, we are still waiting for Labour to do its job.

When the next financial crisis arrives, Labour must demand bank breakups, stricter (and streamlined) capital reserves requirements, an end to financial secrecy, and a hard rule that any bank that takes a government bailout will have to subject itself to voluntary nationalisation. Read the rest