Some have attributed Nick Clegg’s proposal to give every British voter a share in the UK’s state-owned banks (floated during a trade visit to Rio de Janeiro) to a combination of jet lag, domestic political calculation and Copacabana sunstroke. But the UK deputy prime minister’s suggestion has a long pedigree – longer than perhaps even he recognises.
A former colleague has pointed me in the direction of a 1978 paper by the FT’s Samuel Brittan and Barry Riley – A People’s Stake in North Sea Oil – that proposed just such a distribution of “North Sea stock” and predated the privatisations of the 1980s (not to mention the internet – it seems to be unavailable to link to online). Sir Samuel, as he is now, brought the paper into FT headquarters on Thursday. The economist and columnist is planning to send it to Mr Clegg, whose own inspiration was an idea floated in March by Stephen Williams, another Liberal Democrat.
Some of the aims of the Brittan-Riley paper were different – for instance, to inoculate an important part of British industry against renationalisation (something no mainstream UK party now advocates) – but the parallels are fascinating.
So Mr Clegg proposes a “people’s banking system” and says:
Psychologically, it’s immensely important that the British public feel they have not just been overlooked and ignored.
Writing in 1978 (when Mr Clegg was 11) Sir Samuel and Mr Riley, himself a distinguished former FT columnist, pointed out:
A widely spread direct and personal interest in the profitability of enterprises would… be a very good way of underpinning the legitimacy of the profit motive.
- and they added:
The advent of North Sea oil makes it possible, if only we had the imagination, to take a giant stride towards a genuine people’s capitalism.
Straight distribution of shares in nationalised industries was not the route taken by Margaret Thatcher. She decided to sell off assets like British Petroleum and British Telecom, whereas Sir Samuel and Mr Riley wanted to protect the revenues from oil from being squandered by the government. Similarly, Lady Thatcher’s Conservative heirs in the UK coalition government (and the modern Treasury) are likely to prefer a straight sale of their stake in Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group.
But Sir Samuel has not abandoned hope. When I asked him on Thursday what he thought of the Clegg plan, he told me: “If I were an independent MP, I’d vote for it.”
