Firstly, I think the author is right to single out the responsibility borne by Bodger Broon for the disempowerment of a huge swathe of the UK public, by his ‘light touch regulation’ and his ‘saving the world’ (an interesting and hubristic Freudian slip) by transferring shedloads of public money to the very financiers who ruined the economy. Rather than the adverb ‘supposedly’ to modify the adjective ‘left-wing’, it would be more accurate to use the term ‘mendaciously’.

Secondly, and more importantly than I venting my spleen, he has correctly identified that companies are ‘social constructs’. They are not natural phenomena as the current neoliberal hegemony would like us to believe. They are not ‘how things are’, they are what the rentier class invented to maximise the income for their insatiable greed. And, the regulations governing them and the operation of the equally socially constructed ‘free market’ are not about the state mediating between competing interests but about the empowerment of an oligarchy to the detriment of all others.
The control by this group over much of the media and increasingly over the depressingly grangrindian facts-based curriculum in our schools means that ‘the company’ is an unexamined construct implied to be equivalent to the laws of electromagnetism or gravity. By these means, the hegemony is perpetuated and strengthened.

Of course, there are alternative constructs and the list of things the author lists are found in the UK, and to a greater extent in places like France and Germany, as well as in many places across the world. Most of the empirical evidence on these alternatives indicates that even by many of the measures used by the hegemonic concept, these companies usually have superior outcomes and all stakeholders benefit.

However, outside of academic circles, trades unions and a few geeks who seek out information, this is given very little publicity. We are continually presented with allegedly good information about ‘increased profits’, ‘stock markets at record highs’, ‘buoyant property markets’. That these things are unquestionably ‘good’ is that these goods ‘trickle down’ to the extent that even poor people have shoes! Thank you for that pearl of wisdom, Mr Portillo.

Sadly, Labour is not going to be able to bring about such changes as, say, Mr John McDonnell would like. He has too many opponents in his own party as a timeous recent book shows. And, if Labour were radical enough to have significant policies, the notorious ‘run on the pound’ and other well tried actions would take place.

The UK has to end. Scotland and Wales have to go their own ways and Ireland should be united again. The metropolitan areas of England have to develop their local powers, such as Manchester and Birmingham did in the 18/19th centuries to rebalance the distribution of power across England. Without Scotland’s oil, gas and renewables and its huge slice of territorial waters, the underpinning of the City will be gone and the ridiculously distorted economy of England will collapse because the disproportionate balance towards the financial sector will be destroyed. It will not be pleasant, but, then, it’s not going to be pleasant to continue as things are. The crash, allows the possibility of renewal, the present simply, to put an Orwellian 1984 twist on ‘New’ Labour’s cynical slogan, means ‘things can only get worse’. That is the true legacy of Mr Blair and Bodger Broon.