Mandelson’s plaintive excuse for washing his hands of the Cadbury debacle on the grounds that the decision “was one for the shareholders of Cadbury” is really pathetic. What are Ministers for? Their role is, not tamely to roll over when confronted by the damage inflicted by market-driven neoliberal capitalism, but to change the rules governing the operation of the economy or of society where outcomes undermine the public interest. What clinched the takeover was the short-term purchase of a quarter of Cadbury shares by hedge funds which bought them up very late in the day in the hope of a quick bonanza. One answer therefore to this latest brand of predatory capitalism would be, as the union Unite is now recommending, to limit votes in a takeover situation only to long-term shareholders, thus eliminating any role for the hedge funds. But that is surely not adequate. What about the primary stakeholders, the employees, 6000 UK workers in the case of Cadbury who now stand to lose their job in large numbers to pay off the debt of this heavily leveraged bid?

Government shouold be about holding the ring between conflicting private interests in order to ensure that none is so dominant as to swamp all the others. Under the rules of neoliberalism colossal agglomerations of private capital are empowered to roam the world searching for the highest short-term capital returns without any regard whatsoever of other interests whether national economies, industrial networks or employees’ livelihoods. In this primitive jungle the function of Ministers should be to establish that the public interest is paramount and to set the rules that ensure that other relevant interests apart from private capital are properly safeguarded. One way to do this would be not just to give enhanced voting rights to long-term institutional investors, but also to provide that in takeover contexts it would be necessary to gain majority consent in a second and separate category of voters, namely the employees in the target company.
That, at a stroke, would decimate the overweening power of the City and all its minions to ride roughshod over a nation and its people and begin to build a very different kind of capitalism, a real stakeholder network of interests in which all the parties had a genuine and balanced interest. It would be more participatory, more incentivising, more equitable, and more likely to raise productivity. It’s the sort of radical vision that might persuade Labour voteres that their party had not finally deserted them.

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