UK financial establishment losing fear of radical Labour government
... Earlier this month, Oliver Harvey, an analyst for Deutsche Bank in the City of London, told the Telegraph: “We see the magnitude of economic damage caused by a no-deal Brexit as much higher than [that caused by] policies proposed in the last Labour manifesto.” In the same article, Christian Schulz, an analyst for Citibank, noted approvingly that “Labour has become more decisively pro-EU”, while “a fiscally profligate no-deal Conservative government” had become less “enticing”.
Off the record, other senior people in the City tell me they find the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, who has been circulating among them busily in recent months, a serious and intriguing figure: a supposed Marxist who looks, and sometimes talks, a bit like a bank manager.
A similar thaw is under way in the more thoughtful parts of the business press. With western capitalism having a crisis of confidence, at the very least – this week the Financial Times announced “Capitalism: time for a reset” – Labour’s radical economic alternatives have begun to look more reasonable to some business journalists. The Economist, despite its longstanding support for the Thatcherite free-market reforms that McDonnell would like to reverse, has been covering the development of Labour’s new economic thinking with intense curiosity since 2017. This month, the more cautious, centrist FT has published a succession of long articles about “Labour’s new establishment” and its ambitions for Britain. While the pieces were still spiked with criticisms, the scale of the coverage has suggested a degree of respect – and that corporate Britain needs to understand Corbynism, and be prepared to make some accommodations with it...
... Since Corbyn took over Labour, the Tories and Liberal Democrats have each had three leaders. Meanwhile Labour’s policies – relentlessly dismissed as weird and naive by newspapers that saw no downsides to austerity and Brexit – have in fact often carefully gone with the grain of public opinion: renationalise the railways, raise taxes on the rich, put more police on the streets, avoid fighting foreign wars that lead to terrorism... Corbyn’s Labour has helped crystallise what students of the great Italian leftwing thinker Antonio Gramsci would call a new political common sense: a widespread feeling that free-market capitalism has run its course, public spending needs to rise, and the way we manage society and the economy needs to change...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/21/bankers-corbyn-tories-no-deal-capitalism-radical-government
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