The European Yearbook of Business History by Wilfried Feldenkirchen Terry Gourvish

Author:Wilfried Feldenkirchen, Terry Gourvish [Wilfried Feldenkirchen, Terry Gourvish]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780429819100
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

British Dreams, British Realities II: The National Enterprise Board (NEB)

The creation of NEB in 1976 owed much to the arguments of those who promoted IRI as an example to be followed. Holland was a key figure in this, being a crucial insider in the formulation of Labour Party policy on industry in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The impact of his advocacy has to be seen in the extraordinary developments in Labour’s policy-making in these years. In the late 1960s disillusionment with the perceived failures of the Wilson government’s economic policies, including the apparent failure of IRC to deliver the more dynamic large-scale industry which had been promised, led to a sharp leftward movement in the Party policy-making apparatus. This apparatus was dominated not by MPs or the Parliamentary leadership, but by party members elected from the annual conference to its committees, or co-opted onto these committees at national headquarters. This process led to a widening divergence between the official policy of the Party as drawn up by these committees and the views of the Parliamentary leadership.43 This divergence was at its sharpest in the case of the role and purpose of the NEB. Holland and his allies got the Party to accept a radical version of the NEB which drew strongly on the analysis later to be given extensive statement in The Socialist Challenge. This is starkly evident in a key Party document, The NEB: Labour’s State Holding Company drawn up in 1973 and endorsed by the conference in that year. Holland was an influential member of that committee, and the IRI figures strongly as the example to be followed. The argument of this paper was that the existing public sector provided an unprofitable infrastructure supporting the profits of the private sector: ‘what is now proposed by the Party ... is an extension of the public sector into the areas of manufacturing and profitability.’44 The aims of this extension were to promote equality by rebuilding the power of government to control investment decisions. Previous government attempts at this control by incentives and encouragement, the paper argued, had failed, and the need now was for a direct role. The NEB had to be in ‘the new commanding heights of the modern capitalist economy-manufacturing and services’, and here the IRI was cited because of the multi-sectoral spread of its activities.45

The NEB was seen as the solution to a very wide range of problems. Its aims would be ‘National and regional employment creation, the promotion of major new investment and technology projects, price leadership ..., public purchasing on a new scale, export promotion and import substitution, and counteracting the effects of private MNCs operations ...’46

Unsurprisingly perhaps, a Labour government without an overall majority, led by the Centre and Right of the Party, and trying to cope with the economic effects of OPEC 1, was unlikely to regard either the language or substantive proposals of this document as helpful. In the event the proposals were seriously watered down. An NEB was created, but the tone and substance were much altered.

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