50 Years Ago: Mr. Keynes Goes to the Bank 
of England

The news that Mr. J. M. Keynes, the “rebel against financial orthodoxy”, has become a director of the Bank of England and may in due course become governor when Mr. Montagu Norman retires, inspires great hopes among his admirers in the Labour Party, but it will not cause even the slightest flutter among Socialists. His admirers may congratulate themselves because he opposed the return to the gold standard in 1925 and advocated “unorthodox” proposals such as a managed currency and State control of interest rates, but they should remember his own words: “My trouble has been that orthodoxy has always caught up with me”. In other words, his quarrel with the administrators of capitalist finance has always been at bottom that they did not know their job properly, and should take some tips from him. He has never been concerned with our job of getting rid of capitalism.

(From Socialist Standard, October 1941.)