We need to build incentives to virtue rather than incentives to vice, which prevail in the existing system and are self-interested, instrumental and … - Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman

Capital has just become completely disconnected from the people. Labour was born in the world to resist the domination of capital. That’s our thing. So we say that five percent of the bailout should be used to recapitalise local banks. It’s our money anyway. Those local banks should only lend in the area that they’re in. Germany’s a very successful, a very, very successful example of how this can work.

The nadir came out in Gordon Brown’s ‘that bigoted woman’ moment when I think what we saw was where a completely normal person, a Labour supporter too, expresses something about what she could see in her life about there being a lot of immigrants and Brown dismissed her as a bigot. Well, I saw that as an absolute manifestation of a self-righteous, self-regarding, elitism in Labour that really despises the concerns of working people. Labour had reached a situation under Brown where most of the people in the party hated one another and they hated people outside the party too.

The story of the Northern Counties Building Society is instructive. Established in 1850 in the North East by dispossessed workers who pooled their funds to retrieve a home in the world it grew steadily over the years. It was part of the local economy and society, that most precious civic inheritance, a trusted financial institution. In 1965 it merged with another local institution, the Rock Building Society to become Northern Rock Building Society. It demutualised in 1997 and became Northern Rock, which sponsored Newcastle United and became the fifth biggest lender in the UK market. An institution that was founded by local people for local people and had partnered its region in good times and bad for a hundred and forty seven years, that had weathered four serious depressions and emerged stronger from each could not last through New Labour’s period in Government.