Jesse Norman

FT op-ed: The Tories must lead our soul-search on capitalism

Blamed for the credit crunch, reviled as the cause of the eurozone crisis and despised by protesters in St Paul’s churchyard and on Wall Street, there is no doubt about it: capitalism had a terrible year in 2011.

This should be of great public concern.  But it sets free market conservatives a special quandary.  It is now 30-odd years since Margaret Thatcher’s government took the decisions to open up the British economy, float sterling, dismantle state subsidies, attack cartels, privatise industries and deregulate the City of London.  Are current events an indictment of that long arc of government?  Has the Conservatives’ belief in free markets been a mistake?  Or is something else going on?

New paper: The Case for Real Capitalism

My short paper The Case for Real Capitalism is published today by the Free Enterprise Group of MPs.  It can be found here under Books, or on the Free Enterprise Group website.  

Update:  The full version has much more detail and political analysis.  It can be found here, or again under Books.

Guardian op-ed: The FSA's report on RBS does not do enough to counter crony capitalism

As yesterday’s report by the FSA shows, the purchase of the Dutch bank ABN AMRO by the Royal Bank of Scotland will be seen in retrospect as one of the illusions of the epoch—the high water mark of the crony capitalism of the past decade.  

Lest we forget, led by its accountant-turned-banker Fred “the Shred” Goodwin, RBS launched a spree of bank acquisitions after buying NatWest, a bank three times its size, in 2000.  It became the fifth largest bank in the world, its assets rose by over four times, profits soared, and Goodwin was given a knighthood by his fellow-Scot, Gordon Brown.  In 2007, he capped it all with a huge mainly-cash bid for ABN, trumping a rival bid by Barclays.