So I am thankful to Lord Digby Jones, a man who served as trade minister under Labour, for bringing the comparison to my attention. The erstwhile head of the Confederation of British Industry believes that the treatment dealt out to Fred Goodwin earlier this week carries ‘the faint whiff of the lynch mob on the village green’ about it.

Who knows? Maybe Alan Parker can be prevailed upon to remake his powerful 1988 film ‘Mississippi Burning’, maybe relocated to somewhere like Esher, as bands of roaming vigilantes track down and string up stray City Boys.

Lord Jones might care to ponder on the fact that victims of lynch mobs in the last century were typically hung to death. Not only is Mr Goodwin still very much alive, but he is in receipt of a pension of hundreds of thousands of pounds a year while still a sprightly fiftysomething. That doesn’t sound too bad to me.

According to the Wikipedia, the home of all reliable information on the internet, Goodwin is the son of an electrician from Paisley, a place where not many kids on the local council estates will have had feudal titles when he was growing up there in 1960s. And the few that did would probably have been bullied on account of it.

Whether or not Fred the Shred is particularly bothered about no longer being able to use the designation ‘Sir’ we do not know. But if he has got any sense, he will not give a monkey’s. If there is any whiff of lynch mobs here at all, it is decidedly faint.

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Don’t get me wrong, Ed Miliband has handled the Simon Hester affair in a manner that compensates – well, ever so slightly, perhaps – for the self-inflicted damage brought about by the Labour leadership’s accommodation to austerity.

Faced with the prospect of a Commons vote on the morality of the boss of a state-owned bank awarding himself a million quid bonus after thrashing the share price and dumping a large chunk of the workforce on the dole, the Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive has suddenly decided he could bump along without the money after all.

Ignore the anguished squeals of ‘vilification’ and ‘witch hunt’ emanating from the usual suspects. If these people are not entirely aware of the extent of the public anger directed against them, then the private jets and the superyachts really are insulating them from reality.

Last weekend’s small victory has handed Miliband the tactical initiative, and Ed has taken advantage of it by urging a change in the way all banks, public and private alike, remunerate senior staff.

This morning the BBC is quoting him as saying: “Let’s change the rules on corporate governance so that, let’s say, if you are paid a bonus it’s for exceptional circumstances … The culture right across the city has to change and we’ve got to put in new rules.”

New rules, you say? Either that is a firm commitment to some sort of binding cap on banking bonuses, or I simply haven’t spotted the wriggle room. But to take Miliband’s words at face value, he appears to accept the intellectual case for a government-imposed limitation on the maximum amount that private companies can elect to pay their employees. That is something that would have been unthinkable under either Blair or Brown.

The end of Labour’s embarrassing schoolgirl crush on the super-rich hasn’t come a moment too soon. My only hope is that Miliband will not succumb to the inevitable forthcoming free market propaganda blitz and sticks firmly to the stance.

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Throw in repeated over-the-top use of alleged analogies between liberals and German fascism, and deliver the outcome in a prose style reminiscent of Jeremy Clarkson minus his characteristic wit, intelligence and literary panache, and you end up with what evidently passes for serious comment on the political right these days.

Precisely because this offering is from a big name writer in Britain’s best-selling broadsheet newspaper, it is worth considering exactly what is being said here.

Randall starts by invoking Churchill’s famous speech to the US Congress in December 1941, in which the late prime minister famously asks: ‘What kind of people do they think we are?’ From there, through the insertion of the three words ‘seven decades later’, Randall describes the dystopia of Britain today, as he sees it:

‘What has happened to the freedoms and independence for which [Churchill] urged us to fight? It’s hard to imagine our wartime chieftain being anything other than dismayed by the erosion of sovereignty, capitulation to the “equalities industry” and enslavement by debt. We have lost control of domestic borders, ceded legal primacy to Europe and allowed the Storm Troopers of political correctness to stamp their corrosive version of right and wrong on British law.’

The ludicrous contention here is that there is some form of parallel between what this country has become and what this country might have been had it lost world war two, with Monsoon-frocked social workers organised in mass right-on paramilitary formations to provide the necessary thought police. These are presumably the first death squads in history with an equal ops policy.

Actually, I suspect that Churchill would have knocked back another breakfast time double brandy and shrugged his shoulders about where we are now. Britain has participated in European integration because that was the only realistic option open to the post-war British capitalist class.

If Randall regrets the consequences, he should recall that it was Macmillan that first applied to join the Common Market, Heath who took Britain in, Thatcher who signed the Single European Act and Major who agreed the Maastricht Treaty. The storm troopers of political correctness cannot be blamed for everything.

Yet he is insistent that ‘human rights obsessives and jackboot egalitarians’ have led us to our present sorry state of affairs. And there was me thinking that liberals wore Birkenstocks.

He goes on to accuse the left of relentless assaults on popular consciousness, of demanding the unconditional surrender of adversaries and the criminalisation of those who resist us. To top the lot, he even speaks of something called ‘the Brown Terror’, presumably intending to evoke the Red Terror of the early years of the Russian revolution.

Look Jeff, I wasn’t too much of a fan of Gordon either. But if his supporters really had instituted a period of mass arrests and summary executions, I would have been among the first to put down a resolution condemning such actions at my local Labour Party ward.

Then there is all those bleedin’ foreigners, innit. Randall has got nothing against them, you understand. His only surprise is that ‘so few’ are already here. After all, who wouldn’t quit a ‘rat hole’ in Bucharest for £500 a week in handouts and a subsidised home?

Yes folks, that really is how Randall thinks that immigration works.  Millions of Britons with at least one immigrant parent – and full disclosure: that category includes me – will know that the overwhelming majority of immigrants come here to graft their socks off, leaving the national economy  better off as a result.

True, my mum did get disability benefits, a widow’s pension and a council flat. But she earned them by helping to build the NHS as one of its first nurses, and then scrubbing floors and working part-time in a care home while she raised two kids. Just like hundreds of thousands of immigrant women are doing today, I guess.

Sorry, but many of us actually like Britain pretty much the way it is now. Our inability to send Abu Qatada back to Jordan is not firm evidence that everything is going to hell in a handcart.

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Throw those Marxist and Keynesian textbooks out the window, people. We are where we are because the former chairman of the Federal Reserve responded to the dot com crash with a cheap money policy that fed the real estate bubble that triggered the credit crunch.

One of his predecessors in that office remarked that the job of a central banker is to take away the punch bowl before the party gets going. The charge is that Greenspan topped it up with a healthy slug of Havana Club Añejo 7 Años. Or more likely, nasty capitalist Bacardi, I guess.

It is gratifying to see the bastards blaming one of their own. Greenspan’s credentials on the other side of the spectrum to mine were once regarded impressive indeed. As a young man, he was a close friend of no lesser a rightwing pin-up gal than Ayn Rand.

Greenspan pops up in the Financial Times this morning, with a thinkpiece defence of capitalism that centres on an argument lefties have heard many times before.

Compare post-1945 East Germany with post-1945 West Germany, and see which did better. Look at how China has been doing since it turned to the market. Whatever you think about capitalism, it has delivered a tenfold increase in real GDP per capita over the last two centuries.

Marx would have absolutely agreed. None of his writings – or at least, none that I have read – anywhere disputes the impressive dynamism that capitalism displayed in his time. What is at issue in volumes two and three of Capital is whether that dynamism can be sustained indefinitely as capitalism ages.

Nor did every Marxist defend the Deutsche Demokratische Republik when it was up and running, of course. A substantial minority of us were well aware of its failings, both economic and political.

So what is the difference between the left and the right on these issues? In short, the right regards capitalism as humanity’s final form of economic organisation.

Occasional downturns are simply a comparatively minor price to pay for a secular upwards trend towards ever greater prosperity for ever greater numbers of people. Even now, for the likes of Greenspan, nothing is wrong with capitalism that more capitalism cannot fix.

The left will instead point to the increasing frequency of recessions since the 1970s, declining rates of growth and even declining rates of profit, permanent mass unemployment, rising inequality and the exploitation of labour power as reasons to demur.

For us, the only real surprise is that these tendencies have been in abeyance for the last three decades. Actually existing capitalism is a long way away from the Platonic form that the erstwhile Fed boss seemingly regards as the norm.

The best polemicists from both camps have been arguing this one out for several generations. The years ahead may well show which side was right all along.

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But thanks to Retail Week, I am now aware of something called the Asda Income Tracker, which measures discretionary spending after all the big bills are paid.

The combined effects of inflation and unemployment means that the average UK family is 7.2% worse off than a year ago, somehow getting by on just £160 a week. There are big regional variations within that figure; in Northern Ireland families have to last that long on an astonishingly low £74.

So when Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, speaks of ‘the longest period over which real wages have failed to rise since the 1920s’, he is being disingenuous. Real wages are not just stagnating, they are falling sharply.

As recently as the 1970s, the inevitable result of such a decline in standards of living would have been an upsurge in industrial militancy, with trade union negotiators slapping in claims that covered the cost of living and then some, and backing up the demands with industrial action.

Given the changes in both the composition and consciousness of the working class, the mood is instead more one of grim resignation rather than anger. Yet much Coalition policy can be seen as driven by an attempt to mitigate the so far silent resentment.

The takeaway from government attempts to bring in a benefit cap is surely a reassurance to those in work that those out of work will be even worse off than they are.

Meanwhile, David Cameron seems determined to make an example of Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Simon Hester. UKFI, the body that holds the taxpayer’s 83% stake in RBS, will this week tell the remuneration committee that his bonus should be limited to £1m.

Considering that Hester has presided over a 48% fall in the group’s share price over the last year, and has just put 4,000 employees on the dole, one wonders what is the justification for a gratuitous six figure handout.

This gesture looks like little more than a publicity stunt. Nothing has been said that indicates that RBS global markets chief John Hourican will not pick up the £4m he is due on his 2009 share options.

Nobody should be fooled by the million pound benefit cap for Hester, or by Vincent Cable’s toothless proposals for the reform of executive pay. The practical impact of such measures will be minimal.

The simple point for socialists is that in class terms, the rate of surplus value is relentlessly being driven up, with only tokenistic attempts to rein in one or two beneficiaries of that trend, purely for public relations purposes. That is what rightwing governments are for.

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And huge numbers of City Boys aren’t that fussed about losing their jobs in investment banking because, let’s face it, most of them are better off on the sick.

As abuses such as these so conclusively underline, the case for reform Britain’s archaic benefit system is open and shut. How else can it be that not a single mainstream politician has managed to come out and state openly that Iain Duncan Smith’s call for a £26,000 benefit cap is entirely unjustified?

Well, for a start, the sheer intuitive populist appeal of the notion that nobody on benefits should get more than the average wedge for a full week’s graft makes the idea almost impossible to oppose outright. Framing the debate the way the Tories have chosen to do is sheer bloody genius.

The rejoinder of ‘Aha! So, you’d allow benefit scroungers unlimited cash …’ appears so utterly knockdown. As Oliver Wright points out in the Independent, only 9% of voters have expressed opposition to the IDS plan. Some 36% actually think that the cap should be set far lower, at just £20,000.

Thus even the heads of voluntary sector do-gooder outfits I heard on the radio this morning were reduced to calling for tinkering round the edges, which they hope will be duly delivered by a coalition of bishops and renegade Lib Dem peers in the Lords.

Meanwhile, Labour seems at sixes and sevens. It isn’t going to vote against the cap, although if we are lucky, it might just mumble some objections while it backs it.

But let’s just look at the facts here. The government’s own figures indicate that 100,000 children will be pushed below poverty line on account of these changes.

Even communities secretary Eric Pickles privately admits that 20,000 will be made homeless by the proposals. Far from saving any money, local government will actually end up out of pocket.

In other words, what we have here is a half-arsed, spiteful and misguided piece of legislation, designed to cut living standards of some of Britain’s poorest people (including many of the disabled) to score brownie points with the Daily Mail.

I’m sure those in the firing line will be grateful for any concessions that are secured tonight. But the truth is that the Welfare Reform Bill is just plain wrong. And no major political party dares to say it.

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Even more to the point, socialism remains a dirty word even though aspects of capitalism are being questioned to a degree not witnessed for decades. But note the use of the word ‘aspects’ here. Whatever the popular disgust at bankers’ bonuses, the system itself is not widely questioned.

The vast bulk of the population do not buy into the Marxist analysis that the minority class at the top of society sustains itself by the exploitation of the labour power of the majority.

They accept that current economic arrangements are at bottom essentially just, even if they have strangely gone awry in the last few years. They see nothing wrong that a bit of deft regulation will not fix.

The myth that the rich have accumulated wealth largely by their own entrepreneurial efforts goes largely unchallenged. That’s why so many people fantasise about the day they will appear on Dragons’ Den.

Yet even the limited criticisms that have emerged have reached such a pitch that the nostrums of Hayek and Friedman are no longer seen as the uncontroversial axiomatic starting point for all serious political and economic debate. Supporters of the market are being forced to set out their stall, to use an appropriate turn of phrase.

Witness the current debates on the op-ed pages of the Financial Times, for instance. Another clear pointer is the speech David Cameron delivered on the topic of popular capitalism yesterday, in which he reiterates his belief in free enterprise as the best way forward for society.

The problem for us is that doubts no longer usually translate into support for the policies we propose. Even the Occupy movement has not on the whole adopted common ownership of the means of production as one of its goals. As the famous banner once put it, this milieu simply wants to transform capitalism into ‘something nicer’ instead.

Given that we are living through a period when the notion that capitalism is in crisis is demonstrably correct, and not just an overheated rhetorical claim in badly written Trot rags, it is worth asking why UK opinion is not rapidly moving left.

For socialists who long ago came to the conclusion that the market deserves to be transcended, it is often hard to understand why conclusions so intuitively obvious are not more widely shared.

While some leftwing groups have grown in recent years, there is nothing that can be called a mass influx. All Marxist organisations are much reduced in numbers compared to the 1980s. That is even true of those of them that routinely exaggerate their membership figures.

From the derisory results obtained in elections to the circulation figures of the main publications, what is plain is that the left is in a worse state than at any point in my lifetime.

The explanations are many varied. Some socialists insist that there is widespread support for our basic values, but that our case is subjected to media blackout. Yet this is no more true than it was in the past, when the existing socialist movement got off the ground, and few efforts are made to exploit the avenues that are open to us. We haven’t even got a meaningful internet presence, for instance.

Others point instead to notions of false consciousness, and believe that austerity and mass unemployment will banish reformist illusions, perhaps assisted by revolutions in other countries.

We may only be a couple of years away from the big time, when the bulk of the working class will be won over to a revolutionary party that inexplicably only has two dozen members right now. It has to be said that the historical precedents on this one aren’t great.

I’m not even claiming to have the answers on this one. But it is clear that the other side is doing everything it can to secure a base for its ideology. We should at least be debating how we can do the same for ours.

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The wisecrack metamorphosed into something of a New Labour catchphrase in the mid 1990s, with the line slightly altered to ‘get your betrayal in first’.

Recent statements from both Ed Balls and Ed Miliband suggest that the spirit of the player who gloried in the nickname Bite Yer Legs is alive and – forgive the pun – kicking.

Hence the recent rows over the Labour Party’s sudden shift of direction, which has seen the leadership drop an anyway mild flirtation with social democracy and explicitly adopt neoliberal prescriptions for Britain’s economic crisis.

It is difficult to fault Unite general secretary Len McCluskey’s recent article in the Guardian, which takes Ed Miliband and Ed Balls to task for some of their recent statements, which accept the need for an austerity programme that encompasses a public sector pay freeze.

Many on the left see this as something of a turning point, especially as the leader of Britain’s largest union appears to question the continued affiliation of Unite to the Labour Party. Those that advocate the establishment of some kind of new workers’ party in particular are drawing encouragement.

They have also asked the question – and it is an entirely valid one – of why socialists would want to remain in Labour anyway.

Different people have different reasons, of course. There are still a few people who cling to the ‘classic reformist’ position that a democratically elected Labour government would be able to introduce socialism through parliament. Attractive though that position seems, all historical evidence weighs against the proposition.

More numerous will be the pragmatists, who have been prepared to forgive and forget everything from a virtual cash and carry honours trading business to the invasion of Iraq, in exchange for such undoubted gains as the minimum wage, Sure Start, gay rights, devolution and more spending on schools and hospitals, however funded.

There is also the reality that the far left as currently constituted does not seem an attractive place for socialists unprepared to adopt critical support for reactionaries abroad, and who appreciate the intellectual freedom to be able to speak their minds openly.

That is not luxury accorded to those who argued for greater democracy in the Socialist Workers’ Party at that organisation’s recent conference. Indeed, no reports of their existence have appeared in the SWP press.

Finally, there is the lived experience of the attempts to regroup the hard left since 1996, which have included the Socialist Labour Party, the Socialist Alliance, Respect, Campaign for a New Workers’ Party, Left List, Left Alternative, the Scottish Socialist Party, the Campaign for a Marxist Party, No2EU and probably one or two others I cannot even remember. And yes, I have been involved with some of these initiatives myself.

The latest incarnation of this brand of politics, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, recently stood a candidate in a Brighton council by-election. She secured just 20 votes.

The SSP excepted, most of these outfits have amounted to little more than arenas for recruitment for their constituent parts. They are beset by a woeful amateurism that encompasses everything from the inability to organise systematic canvassing to not even seriously attempting to generate media coverage.

It does strike me that much leftwing support for Labour is essentially conditional, and that existing loyalties would be carefully considered if Unite and/or other unions were remotely serious about starting something new.

Mr McCluskey has been willing to attack Balls and Miliband in a national newspaper, in terms that the left will welcome. But don’t forget to discount for positioning.

There is nothing in his track record to suggest that he will pull off a feat that proved beyond Arthur Scargill. It strikes me that Labour and the unions are still some way away from a break.

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That these designations are typically vacuous and point to little of substance matters not. Fail to play the game, and posterity will forever associate you with traffic cones hotlines.

Yet Ed Miliband – raised in a household where the finer points of political sociology will presumably have been routine conversation over the cornflakes – has yet to offer us a boiled-down manifesto.

The result is that even those of us who are well disposed towards the Labour leader remain at a loss to define his message.

Yes, I am glad to see someone in the top job who does not treat trade unions in the same way as US Marines treat the corpses of captured Taliban combatants, and who is even ready to appear on a TUC platform.

But for Miliband simply to define himself as standing for ‘fairness’ in the abstract is not enough. It is not as if any politician of any stripe stands up and openly features iniquity, malfeasance, discrimination, injustice and horsewhipping small children as central to their programme.

And worthy as it is to demand that grannies should be on the lowest available dual fuel tariff, as visions of the future good society go, this is hardly up there with ‘I have a dream’ in the inspirational rhetoric stakes.

The result is that Miliband leaves himself open to sniper fire from both directions. The Tories would slag him off whatever he did, of course. But his continuing lack of clarity gives Blairites and Blue Labour the opportunity constantly to repeat charges of strategic drift and lack of narrative, and the cumulative effect is damaging.

A credible elevator pitch would at once disarm the critics and give Labour Party members something to sell on the doorstep. How hard can it be, Ed?

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If Scotland goes its own way, a permanent Tory fiefdom would result in England and Wales. But Europe would gain another country with a social democratic centre of political gravity. Let the Scots decide their own future.

Nairn’s volume still sits on my shelves, and I guess I will have to dust it off in the weeks ahead, as the issues it raises attain new salience. What was 30 years ago an abstract proposition of the type I loved to debate with other lefties in the student union bar has emerged as a strong possibility, and not too far down the line at that.

The latest deliberations over a referendum on Scottish independence have been presented by several commentators as some sort of political poker contest between Cameron and Salmond. It looks increasingly likely that the Scottish National Party leader will take the pot after cleverly bluffing a mid-pocket pair.

The constitutional technicalities of all this count for little.  Ever since the SNP’s landslide election triumph last May – after a campaign that saw a lacklustre Labour Party blow a double-digit poll lead – it has had both morality and momentum behind it.

A referendum looks like it is coming in 2014, whether the Coalition likes it or not. A yes vote is not inevitable; support for a breakaway has always fluctuated, depending on just how ghastly London governments have made themselves to the Scots at any one time.

Yet if the perception is that going it alone will allow Scotland to opt out of austerity imposed by a Conservative government in Westminster, nobody should be surprised if the Nats pull this stroke off.

Until now, the unionist tradition has carried sufficient weight on the right to make it unimaginable that the Tories could even countenance conceding such a demand. Yet south of the border, attitudes may be starting to change.

Consider, for instance, the survey of the largely right of centre readership of City AM last May, which found that 51% support for Scottish independence, largely on the grounds that the Jocks are a bunch of scroungers leeching off the real wealth creators in financial services.

Now that the oil has just about run out anyway, surely some English Conservatives would find the prospect of guaranteed Tory rule for all time that little bit tempting. All they would have to do is to cry a few crocodile tears, and then gleefully grant Salmond his wish, while publicly protesting reluctance all along.

After that, this issue becomes just like any other divorce. The only real argument will be over which partner gets the record collection.

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