THE ROW sparked off when the shadow Chancellor, Gordon Brown, claimed that Labour's recent policy statement, Financing Infrastructure Investment: Promoting a Partnership Between Public and Private Finance (FII), had 'stolen a march on the Tories" provided journalists with rather sexier copy than the contents did.
It's a dull subject, perhaps. Yet Britain is crying out for infrastructural renewal. Some 5,000 miles of primary roads are in urgent need of repair.
One sewer pipe in six is more than 100 years old. If something is not done soon, we could quite literally end up in the brown stuff. So what is Labour saying?
The document, co-authored by Brown, employment spokesman John Prescott and trade and industry spokesman Robin Cook, is poorly presented and hardly racy reading.
Its basic proposition is that as long as any given item of infrastructure is up and running, who gives a toss who paid for it? PLANS for the Socialist Campaign Group Network (SCGN) conference 'Fighting for Full Employment -Socialist Policies for the Co-author John Prescott * labour has always based its economic thinking on what used to be called the mixed economy. Prescott developed similar themes for British Rail during his stint at transport, with little ideological flack from the Left. Labour Keynesians such as Roger Berry find both good and bad in the document.
Infrastructure
For their part, the Conservatives have no qualms whatsoever about funding major infrastructural projects, provided they are in Malaysia and that there's a nice little drink in it for their business buddies.
Even the Bolsheviks' New fascism; the international context; arms conversion and public ownership; the welfare state and the trade unions.
The workshops will be folTory Treasury guru Portillo Economic Policy conceded the role of private capital in the process of socialist construction. So is FII revisionism run rampant or just plain common sense?
As Prescott rightly remarked, the document is about accountancy, not socialism. Socialists can be forgiven for asking, why bother with the Labour Party when you could join the Institute of Chartered Accountants instead?
To secure for the workers, by hand or by brain, a 49 per cent stake in the Chipping Sodbury by-pass is now the cutting edge of Labour's proposals for making good the disrepair wrought by 15 years of free market vanThe forum also passed two emergency resolutions. The first regretted the recent refusal of some Labour MPs to vote for an equal age of conVAT RIP Labour lacked even the courage to pledge a repeal of Tory VAT on fuel - let alone socialist policies dalism.
While the Tory Right has tried to paint FIl as 'a new disguise for sin', the Tory Left pointedly welcomed it in principle.
Reaction from the private sector, from the Federation of Civil Engineering Contractors to Alistair Morton, chairman of both Eurotunnel and the government's Private Finance Initiative, has also been overwhelmingly favourable.
There is more than a grain of truth in Liberal Democrat claims that it is now difficult to slip a treasury bond between the two major parties on the question.
Even from a social democratic rather than a Marxist light, Labour's latest thinking is astonishingly timid given the scale of the task at hand.
FIl seems to accept the current level of public sector investment as given. Yet in other places it rightly points out that the public Sector Borrowing Requirement is an accountancy fiction virtually unknown in other countries.
Borrowing
If governments can always borrow more cheaply than private companies, as FIl rightly points out, why doesn't Labour put its cards on the table and say it will increase government borrowing to fund essential investments?
The probable answer is the treasury team's ingrained fear of allowing the media to brand Labour's plans as 'tax and spend'. POOR Many on the Left are worried about one sentence in particular: 'We also see a limited application in the provision of private finance for publicly led projects in education and health.' What the advantages are, other than bolstering the party's private enterprise credentials, are not spelt out.
Nor are some of the drawbacks of private sector involvement. Private companies can and so go bust, especially under a Government hell-bent on ensuring a recession a decade.
The extension of London underground's Jubilee Line to Docklands was made conditional of f400 million funding from Olympia and York, developers of Canary Wharf. Their spectacular bankruptcy put the project back years.
But probably the most important criticism of FII is that it is devoid of macroeconomic conText Instead of drawing up an isolated check-list, plans for rebuilding Britain's crumbling infrastructure should form part of a socialist government's wider strategy for generating full employment. The big picture has clearly not been thought through.
And if Labour sticks to its guns and enforces health and safety standards and the right to trade union recognition on Britain's building sites, let alone try to extend social ownership, it may find that the traditionally Tory civil engineering and construction tirms are not so friendly after all.