Passing the “collection of stone pumpkins and pepper-boxes” (Cobbett’s term for Brighton Pavilion’s arches, domes and minarets) always reminds me of a Danish politician saying in 1964 that Britain would never make it to Europe because the lasting imprint of its Indian experience made it so un-European. He should eat his hat now that Gordon Brown has persuaded European Union leaders (also the United States of America reeling from a $455 billion deficit) to accept his prescription for recovery. The prescription also underlines a commonalty of ideas among Brown, Manmohan Singh and the Fabian legacy of Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, the welfare state’s creator who coined the phrase “commanding heights of the economy” so beloved of Jawaharlal Nehru.

Brown’s £500 billion strategy to avert financial disaster has prompted accusations of the back-door revival of Clause 4 of the Labour Party charter, drafted by Sidney Webb in 1917 and removed by Tony Blair in the Nineties, promising workers “the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution...upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. The second of the 10 points Singh outlined to the Confederation of Indian Industry in May 2007 read, “Unless workers feel they are cared for at work, we can never evolve a national consensus in favour of much-needed more flexible labour laws aimed at ensuring that our firms remain globally competitive.”

Brown hasn’t formally reinstated Clause 4, which inspired Nehru’s passion for nationalization, but the takeover of a huge financial institution like Northern Rock and the £35 billion strategy to acquire control of Halifax Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB and the Royal Bank of Scotland indicate the end of the Washington Consensus that free market reforms must trump state-run economies. Even the US Treasury accepts the need to buy stakes in American banks. Brown’s advice to the oil industry to pass on to consumers the reduction in the price of petroleum and warning against huge corporate bonuses (“industry needs to be moderate in its emolument levels” for “rising income and wealth inequalities can lead to social unrest” — Manmohan Singh’s fourth point) echo compassionate Big Government.

Crypto-communists need not gloat over another end of history. The crisis does not condemn capitalism so much as a human instinct that manifests itself in all systems. Edward Heath rightly condemned “the unacceptable face of capitalism”, but Air-India’s Rs 3,000 crore debt confirms that public sector “maharajas”, as a parliamentary committee report called the heads of nationalized industries, can be equally grasping like the old Soviet rukovodiashchie kadry, the privileged managerial elite. But US Congressional hearings highlighting the extraordinary opulence and financial jiggery-pokery of private-sector tycoons can only strengthen the popular fixation with the obvious stereotype. As an interviewer said of Lehman Brothers, the collapsed investment bank, its senior executives did well while the bank flourished and continued to do well when the bank was on the rocks.

A return to socialist autarky is not the answer: it would “obstruct the forces of competition from having freer play”, the sixth of Singh’s points. His call for “profit maximization” to be kept “within the bounds of decency and greed” — which it outrageously did not in Britain and the US — would be best met through stronger regulatory oversight reinforced by international consensus. So essential for growth, the private sector worldwide will show the “self-restraint” the prime minister recommends only when it fears the consequences of not doing so.

Singh’s 10 points were criticized, presumably for warning against the “excessive remuneration” and “ostentatious expenditure” of those who control everything in modern India, including the media. But the tone and even words powerfully recalled Bevan’s thundering in 1959 against “the so-called affluent society”, which he called ugly: “It is a vulgar society. It is a meretricious society. Modern capitalism has not succeeded; it has failed.” Singh declared that “showing off riches through ostentatious parties is as good as insulting the less privileged and stoking social unrest”. But displays of wealth go far beyond the spectacularly prolonged weddings to which our new rich are addicted. No “consumption” is more “conspicuous” than their appetite for high-profile foreign companies.

I am unable to discern any justification for this particular kind of acquisitiveness in terms of Singh’s criteria of making “the growth process more inclusive”, improving productivity and alleviating poverty, though, admittedly, the vast fortunes squandered on purchases abroad may bring emotional satisfaction to Ratan Tata, Lakshmi Mittal and their less exalted emulators. Infosys’s withdrawal of its £407 million bid for the British software company, Axon, is a realistic development. India needs its resources at home to add value, generate employment, enhance export earnings and fulfil what the prime minister calls a “wider social responsibility”, instead of buying glamour abroad.

American military overstretch, with 200,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and more in East Asia, is another form of extravagance whose political consequences bear considering. The Economist welcomed the 1929 crash as “the deflation of the exaggerated balloon of American stock values”. Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, argues that the US covers its deficits by issuing treasury bonds, mainly to Asian governments, and will have to raise Congress’s promised $700 billion rescue package through foreign loans, probably also in Asia. A diminished American capability to shape the global economy through trade pacts, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank makes this an important step in the direction of a multipolar polity. Brown’s demand for a new Bretton Woods and “a new international financial architecture for the years ahead” could further defuse the concentration of global power. India should have no quarrel with that. As Russia suggests, the G7’s five-point plan to restore confidence in the banking system needs to be followed up by a larger meeting with the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) nations.

Britain and its economy are no longer major global players, but Brown’s “combination of clarity and decisiveness”, citing Paul Krugman, this year’s winner of the Nobel prize for economics, reiterates a commonalty of ideas and interests. Manmohan Singh’s 10-point programme concerning the ethics and equity of economic stability was very similar to Bevan’s warning of the dangers of “consuming the future” through excessive borrowing instead of investing in planned growth. That great historian, Jadunath Sarkar, spoke of “England’s marvellous achievement in India”. The reverse is no less marvellous, and in the loneliness of Brighton’s St Nicholas churchyard stands a weatherbeaten gravestone inscribed, “Sacred to the memory of Sake Deen Mahomed of Patna Hindoostan who died on the 20th of February 1831 aged 101 years and of Jane, his wife, who died on the 26th of December 1850 aged 70 years.”

Some records describe the sheikh as a Bengali Muslim (19th-century Bihar was part of Bengal) who opened London’s first Indian restaurant, Hindoostanee Coffee House, and whose book, The Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794), was the first to be written and published by an Indian in Britain. He was “shampooing surgeon” to two monarchs, George IV and William IV, and his promise to cure “rheumatic and paralytic, gout, stiff joints, old sprains, lame legs, aches and pains in the joints” earned the title “Dr Brighton”. Continuing the pioneering tradition, his grandson, Frederick Akbar Mahomed, developed the sphygmomanometer.

Many such remains scattered about Brighton recall an imperial yesterday whose promise of a coffee-coloured tomorrow threatens, superficially, to widen the chasm my Danish friend mentioned. Maynard Keynes also held that England was not of Europe’s flesh and body. But Brown’s success in injecting new meaning into the Younger Pitt’s stirring claim of England saving herself by her exertions and Europe by her example is a reminder of the parameters of globalization in which Europe must recognize a Britain that can draw on its Indian experience as a double asset.

sunandadr@yahoo.co.in