The ironies were everywhere. Yesterday’s partial nationalisation of the banking industry bears uncanny similarities to a pledge made in the 1983 Labour manifesto, dubbed the longest suicide note in history.

Left-wing Labour MPs could barely hide their glee at the £50 billion part-nationalisation, which – although Gordon Brown omitted to mention it – marked delivery on a 25-year-old manifesto pledge.

Today the 1983 pledge seems prescient. “[We will] exercise, through the Bank of England, much closer direct control over bank lending. Agreed development plans will be concluded with the banks and other financial institutions. We expect the major clearing banks to cooperate with us . . . on these reforms in the national interest.”

For banks that failed to comply with a 1983 Labour government, the warning was clear: “We shall stand ready to take one or more of them into public ownership.”

Times Archive, 1973: Labour's programme

As the party conference is due to begin, there are before it no fewer than 26 official recommendations for nationalization, renationalization, municipalization or deprivation of rights

Related Links

• Rate cuts overshadowed by spectre of recession

In Westminster Abbey yesterday, tourists were innocently stepping over the memorial stones to the early 20th-century social reformer Sidney Webb, author of Labour’s Clause Four pledge to nationalise the “means of exchange”. Over the road at the Palace of Westminster, however, many Labour MPs were keenly aware of the historical context of the day’s events.

After the announcement to MPs, Frank Dobson toured the tearooms saying that bankers should lose their exorbitant salaries. “Public sector pay should apply to those relying on public money, with the levels of remuneration possibly determined by the Low Pay Commission,” the former Health Secretary said teasingly.

John McDonnell, the Labour MP who nearly challenged for the leadership, was forthright: “Without full nationalisation, the Government is effectively nationalising the banks’ losses and privatising the profits so that taxpayers will now pay for this crisis caused by the greed of the bankers.”

Stephen Pound, MP for Ealing, said that yesterday was a victory for those in the Labour Party fighting a class struggle: “We have managed to do more than Lenin did in the timescale.”

But in the past, some Labour politicians wanted to go farther. Mr Brown, as a young red-blooded socialist back in 1975, was an advocate of seizing banks and putting them in public ownership without compensation for their owners. Writing in the Red Paper on Scotland, a collection of essays he edited, Mr Brown said the “public control of industries is essential to the provision of social needs and services”, adding that banks were among the priorities for takeover in his aim of “forging ground for socialist progress”.

Times Recommends

• An officer and a gentle woman
• Dame Helen Mirren is worthy of the Epidaurus
• Foods that can help to prevent swine flu