Confronting
the Corporate Sector

Nothing weakens this Labour Government more, in the eyes of both the electorate and its own rank-and-file Party Members, than its uncritical cosiness with the business world. Ministers talk of the business sector is pure Thatcherite terms, and seem incapable of acknowledging the gross abuses of power regularly.  I even heard the "radical" Peter Hain last week referring to the business sector as "the wealth creators", mouthing the same misconceived platitudes as Margaret Thatcher did.

Huge swathes of the worst wrongs afflicting the world are wrongs of the corporate sector, and of the unconstrained abuse of private property power.  They will be addressed only by a huge concerted effort by the "leftwing" politicians of the world, committed to radical change in the legal regimes governing the corporate sector.

The breadth of the indictment is so huge that many politicians find it impossible to comprehend.  There are over 200 statutory jurisdictions throughout the world claiming to create their own forms of company, each offering range of artificial personality options. Artificial personality has become a deeply dysfunctional aspect of all "advanced" societies, and it is rapidly infecting other simpler societies as well.  What was initially a great, imaginative invention of the Victorian age (1856, London) has become a disruptive plague, destructive in its effects, a vehicle for fraud and deceit, and running wholly out of control.  While the device of artificial personality still has millions of constructive applications, its malfunctions are very serious indeed, and it is the Left that must accept responsibility for tackling these problems.

This is what needs to be done.   These are the Five Pillars of company law reform.

And if you want to sign up for the cause, check in at Tame the Corporations.

Let's clear the ground.  The relief of poverty and the redistribution of wealth, which are primary commitments for socialists - these are not in doubt.  The political question is one of means, not ends - What is the best way to alleviate poverty?

I remain convinced that the Minimum Wage is of only peripheral importance, and has a number of undesirable side-effects.  In search of enlightenment, I attended the Fabian Fringe meeting at Bournemouth last Monday.  And it confirmed my apprehensions.  I learnt a lot about six other devices or mechanisms which were operating powerfully to reduce poverty -

1. All sorts of tax credits - working families, children, pension;
2. More effective job evaluation, job comparability;
3. Gender equality - vital, because so much "low pay" is the low remunderation of women, as compared with male comparables;
4. In public service employment, acting as a "fair" employer - because so much low pay arises in the public sector;
5. Targeted special benefits - the whole range of State benefits;
6. Conventional trade union action.

It seems impossible to differentiate the effects of all these factors.  And that also ignores the "Big Deceit" - namely that it was Labour that introduced the Minimum Wage.  True, Labour in 1998 introduced the National Minimum Wage - but from 1909 to 1982 there was a whole array of minimum wages in force, across the 22 "sweated trades", including shop-workers and factory-hands.  The Minimum Wage was a Liberal device, from the pre-WW1 period, representing an attempt to persuade working-people not to go Left - if the State guaranteed you a minimum-wage, Liberal reasoning went, why should you bother to join a trade union?  The idea has no socialist antecedents, and is bad market-management practice.

At the minimal level at which the statutory hourly-rate has been pitched (now to rise to £4.50p) I doubt if it achieves anything which would not have been sensibly achieved by other means (above).  And it interferes with the operation of markets to make informal and sporadic employment more difficult, and inhibits the informal employment of pensioners. 

• I don't think the Minimum Wage game
  has been worth the candle.