Bowing to business

But the former CBI boss's backing doesn't extend to the point of either joining the Labour Party or hanging around long enough to canvass support for the Prime Minister at the next general election.

He will stand down before the election, claiming that trade and investment "transcend the factionalism of party politics." This puts the fat cat in the unique position of turning his back on new Labour while, at the same time, supporting its pro-business, anti-working-class policies.

Most withdrawals of support from new Labour have been accompanied by angry denunciations of the policies that Mr Jones supports, especially belt tightening for working people while profits, boardroom bonuses and shareholder dividends let rip.

The Trade Minister asserts his support for trade and investment, but his real priority is corporate profit.

The gigantic profits pulled in by Britain's banking transnationals are enabled by the government's acceptance that there should be minimal restrictions on capital's ability to be imported and exported from Britain.

The City's welcome for hot money plays well for the banks, but it does not provide the stable base on which to build a productive economy.

And how can mutually beneficial trade links be built when new Labour, with the enthusiastic support of the profits-obsessed City financiers, turns its back on manufacturing industry?

Other countries, even EU member states, have no difficulty in making government finance available to industries that they deem essential to the national industry. But new Labour's neoliberals congratulate themselves on their consistent backing for the free movement of capital, even if that means the destruction or substantial erosion of most of this country's productive base.

The only area of manufacturing that receives special treatment is the arms industry, which benefits from export-credit guarantees for its sales to unstable and dictatorial states, guaranteeing shareholder profits.

Despite this preferential treatment, employee numbers continue to fall in the weapons of mass destruction sector, confirming new Labour's attitude to working people of seeing them as no more than numbers on a balance sheet.

And the Brown government has treated workers in the public sector no better.

The fact that police officers have had to go the High Court in London to seek a judicial review of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's decision - in fact, taken by the Prime Minister - to trim the value of the Police Appeal Tribunal recommended pay award from 2.5 per cent to 1.9 per cent says it all.

Governments have traditionally treated police as a special case, being aware that they may need them to lay into trade unionists to prevent their success in defending pay, conditions and jobs, as happened in the 1984-5 miners' strike.

But this government has decided to show the police that, as far as it is concerned, they are just public-service workers, like ambulance crews, civil servants, nurses, teachers and all the rest of workforce that it despises.

Working people should unite in the same vein, returning new Labour's contempt and demanding a change of leading personnel and policies to reverse the government's arrangement with big business.