The Bank of England’s charter was quite a normal affair for 1694. Europe's kings and queens were merrily handing out charters and monopolies over other people’s assets at the time. It is rather like going along to your neighbourhood Estate Agent and asking her to sell your next-door neighbour’s house.

But unless you held a gun to your neighbour’s head selling his house might be difficult. There was a Scotsman called John Law for instance who once sold a French King a fiendish plan of this type. It made some people rich - those who got out before the Crash - and it helped America pick up Louisiana for a song a few years later. But it didn’t do the French King much good.

In the days between Brigandage and Empire holding guns to heads was much in vogue. One particularly large gun...a 17th century supergun...was the English Navy with its rule of thumb of having always twice the tonnage on the high seas as everybody else in the world. This big gun is called the US Marines, Shock and Awe or Democracy nowadays.

In the winter of 1795 one hundred years after the pretty piece of rascality that gave birth to the Bank of England Company Tom Paine wrote The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance which attacked the economic system of the English Government.

Paine predicted that within twenty years the National Currency of England would fail. Paine was well versed in monetary matters having published several essays on money and finance in America while editing American Crisis. He was also able to draw on the expertise of his banker friend Robert Smyth.

At the time of writing, England’s foreign debt was in excess of £400 million...£50 billion at current prices...while the cash holdings of the Bank of England amounted to £1 million.‘Bank notes,’ Paine wrote, ‘were not worth the paper on which they were printed’...adding for good measure that ‘the pound sterling would become ever more overstretched.’

The reason was the ‘iron law’ that ‘the national debt was set to rise annually in continual progression.’ Paine had understood the workings of what Thomas Greco refers to as The Growth Imperative. The prediction came true the following year when the Bank of England suspended convertibility of bank notes.

On 27th April 1796 Tom Paine presented copies of The Decline and Fall of The English System of Finance ‘to the French people’ and to both the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of Elders. A member of the Council of Elders enthusiastically proclaimed that the work should be placed under the eyes of everyone concerned with financial matters...prompting a majority of the Council to vote for its official printing and distribution.

The Directory ordered one thousand copies and took the view that Paine’s work was ‘the most combustible weapon which France could at this moment employ to overthrow and destroy the English government.’ It swiftly despatched these copies to the major financial centres of Europe with the intention of persuading investors to unload their English funds thereby reducing England ‘to the nakedness and abandonment to which she must inevitably descend’.

A few weeks later, the Directory arranged the printing of a German-language edition to influence the financiers of Holland, Switzerland, and Germany, ‘whose interests are essentially linked to those of the Bank of London.’ The Directory sent a hundred copies of this German edition to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be distributed by French agents in foreign countries.

Meanwhile more than a dozen editions...as well as five refutations...appeared in London, several editions came out in America, with translations into Italian and other languages, and two German authors published refutations in French. One particular writer, Mr. Joersson, himself in the pay of the English, accused the ‘writer attached to the opposition’ of plotting to reduce ‘an amiable and enlightened people’ to French ‘barbarism.

A hundred and fifty years later in 1932 Winston Churchill started work on his History of the English Speaking Peoples...completed a quarter of a century later. His writings also show a familiarity with money, banking and finance. He writes with authority about the Whigs and their Bank of England Company and makes mention of John Harvey’s Land Bank...the failed Tory attempt to smother the Dutch coup d’état at birth. Once upon a time cabinet ministers understood the treacherous ways of the Money Power and their Clever Clerks. These days are no more.

The current crop of Career Politicians from England’s Celtic Fringes...hijackers of the Labour Party of John Smith and Tony Benn...are ignorant of Financial History and in awe to the financiers who fund their private offices. In their ignorance they believe their thrones to be seats of power...comprehending little of the power behind these thrones. Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution represents a fundamental pillar of Socialist Thought.

The clause...drafted by Sidney Webb in the house where Tony Benn grew up...brilliantly encapsulates large swathes of Socialist Scholarship. It was brushed aside by the New Labour Cabal in a matter of weeks with no mention of the significance of the party’s intent to control the Means of Exchange...vital to Socialists who believe that Socialism is Equal Money.

Instead a phoney debate was launched on the irrelevance of any reference in the constitution of a New Labour Party to such outdated Marxist Nostrums as Controlling the Means of Production in this modern age of knowledge work and automated factories. Has the new Tory Leader David Cameron been better briefed?