Neoliberal nostalgia

Andy Wimbush is nef‘s Communications Assistant and blogmaster. He also draws cartoons for nef‘s newspaper.

Pat McFadden, a neoliberal nostalgic | Photograph: Sharon Wallace

It’s been over a week now since we launched our proposal for a People’s Bank based at the Post Office. In a packed committee room in the Houses of Parliament we heard politicians of all stripes voice their support for this new kind of bank, one that would put communities, small businessses and the financial excluded first.

The only speaker to mince his words and to temper his enthusiasm with caveats was, of course, the Minister for Postal Affairs, Pat McFadden. There is a danger, McFadden warned us, of becoming so ‘nostalgic’ about the Post Office that it blinds us to its current problems and the need to modernise. And then he said: ‘We can’t simply go back to the way things were’.

We can’t simply go back to the way things were.

But isn’t it McFadden and the rest of this Government – rather than the Post Bank Coalition – who are the real nostalgics here? After all, they’re the ones who are desperate for us to go back to the way things were before Lehman Brothers declared its insolvency, before the failure of HBOS and RBS. They continue to pump seemingly endless amounts of public money into banks which, as nef argued in our banking report I.O.U.K., are no longer able to perform the most basic functions of a bank.

The Post Office, by contrast, remains a vital and much-needed element of the UK economy. nef‘s research shows that each post office saves neighbouring small businesses around £270,000 each year. And small businesses employ the majority of the private sector workforce, around about 58%. Nor is the Post Bank simply a means of saving the Post Office network: we also believe it would offer something markedly different to what the current high street banks are doing, even taking into account the fact that these banks are now effectively in public ownership. As Liberal Democrat Treasury Spokesperson Vince Cable said of the Post Bank proposal:

This is an attempt to clean up banking. The co-option of the system has spread right through into the branches. There was aggressive cross-selling, commission-based branch managers were drawing people into transactions they should never have done. This is a cleaner principle based on sound banking ideas, but driven by public interest rather than narrow short-term profits.

What’s more, the proposal could easily be put into action. A recent poll by PoliticsHome.com revealed that 74% of the electorate think that a Post Bank would be a good idea, even at this early stage. And brand experts have agreed that the Post Office is uniquely situated – both geographically and within the public consciousness  – to be able to provide trusted, reliable financial services amid so much economic turmoil.

The only thing stopping McFadden, Brown, Mandelson and their ilk is their neoliberal nostalgia. They are desperate to get back to business-as-usual without apology because it is too uncomfortable to admit that the Thatcherite economics with which they dramatically transformed their party has failed. While they wish that we could all just go back to the way things were, others are forging ahead with a new economy.

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