Although it came to public prominence in the late 1990s, key elements of the radical stakeholder critique of contemporary British capitalism and the policy prescriptions that were derived from this had deep historical roots in the thinking of the British Left. These roots were particularly apparent in its discussion of the short-termism that distinguished the Anglo-American model of corporate finance, a short-termism that was seen as constraining the time horizons of British entrepreneurs and managers through the lack of long-term involvement and commitment to industry on the part of corporate investors. Here it had long been argued on the Left that, historically, the British banking system had, for the most part, provided British industrialists with only short-term finance, finance which gave bankers liquidity and diminished risk, while its recipients avoided the dilution of control which long-term borrowing and investment might have threatened. And what had been historically the case remained so into the late twentieth century. Thus “one of the few international comparisons available, from 1992, shows that 58% of all lending to British small and medium-sized companies was in the form of overdrafts, compared with 14% for Germany, 31% for France and 35% for Italy”. Of course, this had allowed those companies to retain a kind of autonomy from financial intermediaries not enjoyed in countries, such as Germany, where the relationship between finance and industry was more intimate.