GORDON BROWN might accidentally introduce a state capitalist form of fascism to Britain, Janet Daley openly argues in the Daily Telegraph this morning. You think I’m kidding? Here, read it for yourself:

But Mr Brown may find that, out of political desperation, he has talked himself (and us) into demanding that the state must actually run the economy. Clearly, this is not what he would want …

The danger is that he will be trapped by his own rhetoric and be forced to embrace a form of state capitalism (which is the technical definition of “fascism”).

She makes Mad Mel read like an amateur, doesn’t she? This whackjob political sociology must rank as some of the most dangerously confused and politically illiterate garbage I have ever read in any national newspaper. Then again, I seem to recall that her colleague Simon Heffer last year advanced the proposition that bank nationalisation marked the beginnings of ‘Sovietisation’ in this country. The government just can’t win, can it?

Given that the prime minister has only got just over a year left in power to build his Thousand Year Reich, he had better get a move on. I mean, it would take at least 12 months to train up a serious paramilitary corps. Maybe he could call them the Brownshirts; the name has an undeniable historical resonance.

Fortunately, I think we can safely discount Ms Daley’s suggestion, at least until New Labour frames some Dutch bloke for setting fire to the House of Commons.

The irony is, I think I recall Ms Daley writing that she was once a member of the International Socialists. Even if I have got that detail wrong, she frequently makes play of her 1960s leftism, in a condescending ‘that’s how I know where the little bastards are coming from’ kind of way.

So when she uses grown-up words such as ‘state capitalism’, it can only be in full awareness of the body of political theory she is referencing. Yet even by the standards set by former Cliffites gone over to the hard right, her take on these matters is quixotic indeed.

The concept of state capitalism is ultimately rooted in the debates within Marxism in the first two decades of the last century, in which Bukharin built on the work of Hilferding to postulate that finance capital had in many countries fused with the state, forming what he dubbed ‘state capitalist trusts’.

According to this colleague of Lenin, all of the imperialist powers of the day could be described in this manner, especially given the extent of state direction in world war one. While Bukharin overestimated the concretisation of what was undeniably a tendency at the time, it is important to stress that fascism – which had not yet arisen anywhere in the world – did not come into the equation.

Later, Tony Cliff – the founder of what is today the Socialist Workers’ Party, and thus I suspect Ms Daley’s early political mentor – expropriated the term ‘state capitalist’ as a device to polemicise against the orthodox Trotskyist position that Russia was a degenerate workers’ state. Fascism does not come into that picture, either.

More empirically, can New Labour’s reaction to the global economic downturn sensibly be described as embracing state economic control anyway? The government has been careful not to buy voting shares in the banks it has propped up. In other words, it has consciously taken ownership but not control. It is bailing out the free market, because it is ideologically committed to the free market.

Accordingly, not only are the boundaries of state property not being extended; in other areas, they are being rolled back. Only last week, Labour confirmed plans to part privatise Royal Mail, something the Tories considered under Major before bottling out of what is clearly an unworkable scheme.

Back in the early 1980s, sections of the soft left debated whether or not Thatcherism constituted ‘creeping fascism’. Such speculation was misguided tosh of the highest order then. Nearly three decades later, the hard right is reduced to playing the same stupid game, and it is surely indicative of just as shaky a grip on reality.