DAVID CAMERON has graciously offered a kind of political truce in these times of economic national hardship. By offering the Government his party’s support, he hopes to garner some little undeserved credit out of the mess by being seen to do the right thing at a time when people’s jobs and homes are being put at risk with no end in sight as Britain and the Anglo-American finance system sits in the eye of a perfect storm.
Things were due to have improved by the time Tribune is on the streets, which would be good. But things are never – or should never – now go back to normal, if normal means the calamitous deregulatory bonanza which led to the meltdown in the first place.
The wind was taken out of the Tory sails not through concern for national unity but because the Tories, more so than “new” Labour, which must bear some of the blame, have a direct responsibility for it in the first place, as Ian Aitken details with searing clarity on page 27.
Mr Cameron, however sincere he may have persuaded himself to be, does not want to have anything to say because his party and its supporters are deeply, viscerally linked to the aspirational greed, economic recklessness and social contempt which gave rise to the problem in the first place.
It is worth noting in passing that the Liberal Democrats’ Vince Cable has been making a pretty good fist at criticising the Government, and praising it, but above all judging it and holding it to account, without being accused of betraying the national interest.
Indeed, this is no time for a self-denying ordinance on what has gone wrong, the causes of what went wrong and the way to put it right. The dam has burst and the long-term solution does not lie in the short-term spectacle of governments and central banks stuffing taxpayers’ cash into the dykes in order to relieve those responsible for the debacle to be relieved of their “toxic” debts.
A new world economic order is opening up and this is precisely the time to talk about what foundations should be laid in its place.
In what he did feel free to say to his party conference this week, Mr Cameron showed that the Tories have only a back-to-the-future prescription.
As Unison’s Dave Prentis has pointed out, they have shown their true colours and revealed that they have no economic strategy to deliver what Britain required even before the meltdown, let alone after it.
No mention of the Tories and the current crisis should go without reference to the fact that many of the very people who are bankrolling the party have been involved in short-selling shares and the country in one of the contributing factors of the collapse of the financial institutions.
The recent Daily Telegraph cartoon depicting the famous bust of Karl Marx with a smile and the caption “Heh, heh, heh!” was a highlight of the dark humour that has surrounded the fallout.
But the collapse of capitalism this is not. A global paradigm shift from one financial system, largely overseen by democracies, to another, largely not, will sustain the free-market principles of capitalism, albeit with a different global balance of economic power and a change in the rules of practice, principally in the involvement of government.
The old Thatcherite myth that “you can’t buck the market” is broken when the market comes running to government when it has got the economy of entire countries into the mire. The current events prove that the unfettered market is not the solution, but part of the problem. And it shows the need, while providing the opportunity, for long-term, deeper and tighter involvement of government in the market.
That is the only way to prevent a repetition of this crisis and to sustain progress towards the goals of social justice and fairness that the Labour Party and the democratic left in other countries espouse.
If Gordon Brown is one of the cleverest economic brains on the planet and those are his goals he should be weighing up the opportunities already.
