Four Seasons employs 30,000 staff in more than 500 care homes – including 140 which it acquired last year when its rival Southern Cross went bankrupt after another botched private equity deal.

Unlike Southern Cross, whose business model was based on selling off its properties and leasing them back, Four Seasons owns around

60 per cent of its homes, thus limiting its exposure to rising rental costs.

Although Four Seasons is trading profitably it is heavily in debt – to the tune of £780 million – despite selling a 40 per cent stake in the company to Royal Bank of Scotland in exchange for a 50 per cent write down of debts totalling £1.6 billion in 2009. The debt mountain is due to be repaid in September.

Justin Bowden, the GMB’s national officer representing Four Seasons staff, said: “After Southern Cross and the uncertainty leading up to this sale, and refinancing, residents, their families and staff desperately crave stability and calm.”

He wants Terra Firma to ensure its stewardship of Four Seasons won’t be “another EMI-style debacle” – a reference to Terra Firma’s disastrous £4.2 billion purchase of EMI in 2007. It was later re-claimed by lender Citibank when Terra Firma could not service the debt repayments.

There are widespread fears that Terra Firma will follow the cost-cutting approach favoured by most private equity firms and attempt to cut staff numbers and wages.

Helga Pile, Unison’s national officer for social services, urged Terra Firma not to make cuts, arguing that the care home sector is “woefully underfunded” and cannot afford attempts to “lower the quality of care by cutting staff or wages of people who work in it”.

Still, attendees appreciated the features and documentaries on show – except maybe Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in New York, where the Saturday afternoon screening was terminated after 25 minutes, owing to a lack of subtitles.

Eugene Jarecki’s documentary, The House I Live In, was particularly hard-hitting. It posits that the war on drugs is really a war on minorities, including the recently unemployed. Jarecki’s conclusion, that America is four-fifths of the way towards implementing a Holocaust within its own borders – interviewee David Simon’s suggested that the government might as well advocate killing the poor – certainly pushed the point for incendiary effect. However, Jarecki is right to be angry about the mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offences that put men in the “iron hotel” with no prospect of rehabilitation.

At the other end of the scale was director Colin Trevorrow’s nutty but very enjoyable Safety Not Guaranteed, that featured a disaffected magazine intern (Aubrey Plaza) falling for a paranoid would-be time traveller (Mark Duplass). A funny, far-fetched but thoughtful meditation on the perils of turning back the clock, its go-for-it ending put a smile on my face.

On the serious side, we had Sheldon Candis’ Luv, a coming of age drama about a young African American boy skipping school to follow his ex-con uncle (music star Common) on a day-long collision course with self-destruction. The impressive cast includes Dennis Haysbert and Danny Glover.

Director So Young Kim’s For Ellen is a slight story about a never-quite-made-it rock star (Paul Dano) who learns to give up his five-year-old daughter and accept his own irresponsible behaviour. It would make a good double bill with the Dardenne brothers’ superb The Kid With A Bike.

The highlight was the screening of River’s Edge, followed by a question-and-answer session and with director Tim Hunter, who now mostly directs for television, and star Crispin Glover, who uses “corporate-funded films” to finance his own independent features. The film is a little dated. Jurgen Knieper’s score, which Hunter praised as his favourite aspect of the movie, is particularly intrusive.

Dennis Hopper is surprisingly restrained as one-legged former biker and marijuana supplier Feck, who is in love with a blow-up doll. The film is about the aftermath of a senseless killing of a young high school girl whose murder goes undiscovered for several days until a teenager (Keanu Reeves) phones the police. One of his friends (Glover, in a self-consciously stylised performance) tries to hide the body and save the sociopath killer. Only the killer is driven by his own impatience, including a desire for a six-pack of beer. Throw into the mix two 10-year-olds who concuss Feck and get hold of a gun, and you have a cult hit that meditates on youth’s lack of feeling.

In the Q&A, Glover gave a good account of heightening a character’s motivation to make it “all about the ego”, while Hunter bemoaned the lack of exceptional scripts since.

Hunter’s rueful thoughts aside, the festival demonstrated that American independent cinema is in good health. If I learned anything about the parallel film industry in the United States, it is that credits are always deferred to the end of the movie so as not to give audiences misleading expectations. Name actors are mostly happy to help. Sincerity is crucial, even when pushing the envelope. Genre filmmaking is out. As for what I learned from 25 minutes of Julie Delpy, it seems she is turning herself into Mia Farrow from the latter’s Woody Allen films of the 1980s. This is not a good thing.

It’s hardly surprising, as on some estimates 80 per cent of people in Britain live in suburbia. In the United States, the most suburbanised nation on earth, it’s probably an even greater percentage. It’s largely from these areas, the ’burbs on the edges of our cities rather than the spaces in their centres, where much music and sonic innovation has hailed.

I was reminded of the suburban contribution to our musical heritage when I attended the unveiling of a plaque commemorating a subterranean venue down some steps in an alleyway opposite Ealing Broadway tube and rail station in outer-west London. It was here that the Rolling Stones met and began playing gigs.

Others who followed and cut their musical teeth at the venue included Manfred Mann and the Who. The site’s place in rock history was being marked with the plaque’s unveiling by Bobbie Korner, widow of Alexis Korner, the club’s founder, on a drizzly Saturday lunchtime in March. John Gallagher, the Mayor of Ealing sporting an oversized chain, Ealing North Labour MP Steve Pound and council leader Julian Bell were also present.

Something of a media scrum ensued when the big moment arrived. It wasn’t just the council dignitaries who drew in the crowds. Bemused bystanders stopped to see what all the fuss was about. Also in attendance were Tom Robinson (a legend himself), veteran radio DJ Bob Harris and Stones drummer Charlie Watts – rock royalty that had the flashbulbs popping.

Statements were read out through a microphone from those who couldn’t make it: Kenny Jones of the Small Faces sent a letter stating that when London was undergoing the transition from austerity times to being truly swinging, Ealing is where it was at. It’s weird to think such a significant spot in our musical heritage was an in off-centre location at the end of two tube lines: proof, if proof were needed, that the suburbs really do rock.

The suburban influence is prevalent in all pop’s multifarious subsets. I remember pointing this out to an inner-city-based friend who retorted: “That’s because they can afford the instruments out there”.

The British blues scene was often seen as putting a white face on black music. The Stones, from the south London and Kent suburbs, started their musical career trying to emulate their beloved Muddy Waters. It’s a trick that’s been repeated many times. Hip-hop is the ultimate music that constructs itself as having its origins in the inner-city ghettos with their associated deprivation and material poverty. Yet, like the blues before it, it has been adopted by middle-class suburban teenagers as something to rally round. The fact that it plunders from the musical past via sampling technologies and employs lyrical dexterity and linguistic reinvention illustrates the resourcefulness and ingenuity of its creators.

Many a middle-class suburban teenager has sweated over associated board exams in piano and other instruments. There is no need for these in hip hop as old style musicianship is dispensed with. Punk (in which again the south London and Kent suburbs were pivotal) was about studied amateurism. Hip hop flaunts the untutored aspect to an even greater degree. Beat boxing substitutes the need for real instruments altogether.

Of course, “suburban” as a record rack label sounds wrong. It could cover all sorts: 1960s pyschedelia, heavy metal, blues, punk, acid house, Britpop, noughties’ revivalism – you name it. It also has an inherent inescapable naffness about it. The suburbs, with their associations of garden gnomes and net curtains, have never been cool.

Perhaps, though, we should start thinking of an alternative trajectory of suburbia: as a hotbed of musical invention and creative talent rather than cultural backwater. As the Smiths (from the Manchester suburbs Stretford and Wythenshawe) put it: “It’s time the tale were told”.

Across Europe, there is a rising tide of anger, resentment and despondency about the seemingly endless austerity programmes being forced on governments, mainly as a result of the pronouncements of financial markets and the bafflingly mesmeric power of credit rating agencies. It is as if most democratic governments are in thrall to the very people and organisations who brought about the economic crisis in the first place.

Coupled with this is the dominant position of Germany in the eurozone. Counter-intuitively, Germany prospers the weaker the euro becomes, it benefits from all of the advantages of devaluation without having to pay the costs. Further, the right-wing government of Angela Merkel is hamstrung by historical precedent and cultural memory about the great inflation of the 1920s and its political consequences.

Yet, as François Hollande has demonstrated in France, there is now a great appetite for a change of direction and a return to Keynesianism rather than the discredited austere monetarism of the Chicago school. France has always had more respect for the role of the state, as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism that has been dominant in the financial markets for the past 30 years.

Hollande and the French Socialists offer an alternative vision to the bread and gruel as advocated by the financial markets. Hollande’s pledge to unpick the fiscal compact agreed by Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel offers an opportunity to change the approach to the sovereign and household debt crisis that confronts us.

As the Economist stated:  “He has a four-point plan: to create European ‘project bonds’ to finance growth-stimulating infrastructure and energy projects; to reinforce investment by the European Investment Bank; to introduce a financial-transaction tax among willing European countries; and to use [European Union] structural funds more efficiently.”

It is evident that, across the EU, the ideologically driven austerity programmes as adopted in Britain by David Cameron and George Osborne are failing. Austerity is leading to recession and it is the poor and vulnerable who are paying the heaviest price. Already the Greek economy has shrunk by 15 per cent. How can you grow your way out of that?

The elections in Greece, the failure of the centre-right coalition in the Netherlands and the massive unpopularity of centre-right governments throughout Europe is a clear indication that the ideological battleground is shifting dramatically. Opportunities will arise to overthrow the political settlement the centre-right has so carefully crafted over the years.

Hollande’s electoral victory of should be viewed as the first stage in the counter-offensive by the left. Austerity has failed. Those who have prospered the most over recent years should pay their share of the programmes to encourage recovery and growth. This means an immediate end to cuts in public services and an increase in taxation on wealth.

The Labour Party in Britain should grasp the nettle and call for increased taxation of wealth in this country. Ed Miliband should pledge to restore the 50p tax rate for high earners. He should seek to remove all privileges from the supposedly non-domiciled in the United Kingdom and increase tax on properties worth more than £1 million.

He should pledge to increase capital gains tax to the level of income tax. This would have no effect on economic efficiency, as capitalism sees profit and dividends as a cost of staying in business. It would stop the tax-dodging activities of some who use companies to avoid paying their fair share.

High corporate tax rates and high capital gains tax encourage research and development, and investment in efficiency and training.

Labour should be planning a large increase in infrastructure spending with the aim of encouraging private sector economic activity – and hence employment – by taking advantage of historically low rates of interests currently being offered by the European Central Bank, among others.

The party should follow Hollande’s example and offer more than merely offering to cut less fast and not so far. Labour needs to rediscover its redistributive heart and campaign again on a platform of “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.

Turbo-capitalism and neo-liberalism have been spectacular failures. The pendulum is swinging back and increasing numbers of people favour a greater role for the state. Greed is not good. It never has been.

I suppose I could get a weekly insight into obscene wealth of the overclass by reading the Financial Times’ How To Spend It supplement, a favourite of the Gaddafi clan until that family came to a sticky end, or taking out a subscription to Forbes magazine, but that would spoil the yearly surprise. And it wouldn’t be good for the blood pressure – mine or anyone near me.

So I await what is billed as “The definitive guide to wealth in Britain and Ireland” to pop through the letter box with a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch but which, thankfully, remains inquisitive despite the billionaire proprietor’s dead hand.

The 2012 Rich List didn’t disappoint. We learned that, despite Britain plunging into a second recession, the dreaded double dip, austerity the guiding light of a Thatcherite Government sailing under a Cameroon smile, the combined wealth of the country’s 1,000 rich listers rose by 4.7 per cent to £414 billion. It’s avarice beyond imagination.

If the 1,000 lording it over the rest of us in Britain and Ireland formed their own country, they’d be the richest 19th nation in the world (using 2011 International Monetary gross domestic product figures and an exchange rate of £1 to $1.62). The members of this tiny band are wealthier than Switzerland, Saudi Arabia Sweden, Poland, Venezuela, Norway, Argentina, South Africa, Austria, Malaysia, Qatar, New Zealand, Uruguay, Kenya…

You don’t need to be a socialist to think it’s wrong that so much money is concentrated in the hands of so few, but you’d need to be criminally deferential to a super elite to be relaxed at a concentration of wealth that would make a tin-pot dictator blush. The tax affairs of the overclass are also an area of genuine concern. No, make that outrage. Paying tax is regarded as an occupational hazard best avoided by the very wealthiest, teams of high-charging accountants rewarded for depleting the Treasury, minimising contributions to the education, health and welfare of workers and customers, HM Revenue and Customs constantly out-witted by

well-financed opponents as, in the name of “efficiency”, the nation loses out because cuts cost vast amounts in uncollected dues.

Sitting 17th on the list, down

£900 milllion yet still worth £3.3 billion, are Sir Philip and Lady Green. He’s the Topman who David Cameron asked to advise on how to make public services efficient and she’s his Monaco-based wife who minimised their tax bill when a weighty dollop of dividend went to her not him. Green’s report for the Tory Government was greeted as a joke, looking as if it was culled from wild-eyed websites on a Sunday late afternoon after the tax haven’s grand prix. About the only thing that could be said in Green’s favour is he didn’t advise the Department for Work and Pensions to source paper clips from a child labour factory in a dirt poor state run by a tyrant. I should guard, however, against putting ideas in his head.

Top of the pile are Lakshmi Mittal and his family, steelmakers worth

£12.7 billion who maintain a number one run started in 2005. He’s down £4.8 billion, a 27 per cent drop according to the Rich List, but with his loot he can bear that better than a family fleeced of nearly £80 a week in tax credits when the Conservatives demanded they work longer hours when employers are cutting back in the recession. Anyway, Mittal’s pole position may help explain why Labour’s response to the Rich List was muted. The industrialist gave Labour a little of his loose change – a few million quid, I think it was – during Tony Blair’s reign and was a guest at Chequers when Gordon Brown was in the chair.

Peter Mandelson, Lord Mandelson, admitted earlier this year he’s no longer “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes”, with rising inequality and stagnating middle-class incomes the reality of the unchecked globalisation he championed. Every Labour MP should read the Rich List and get angry to get even.

History, to us, is one damn thing after another. Yet the relentless series of momentous events we imagine seemed very different to those who lived through them, much as great events do to us now. And for most people, other than military men and explorers, what was going on even a few miles away passed largely unnoticed.

With no mass media, their horizons rarely went further than their village, market town, or borough boundary. Life, although often short, was a long, hard slog in which nothing much of monumental note ever happened at all.

The best way to understand the past is not to look back at it – or, worse, down on it – but to try to put ourselves in it; to see the past through the eyes of those who lived there. To them, the past was the present. It means forgetting what we know now and accepting what was known then, and judging others as they would have been judged by their own contemporaries.

So it is with Elizabethan England. It may seem perverse that you could escape the gallows by proving you could read a passage from the Bible, as Ben Jonson did by claiming Benefit of Clergy, but it was at least an incentive for learning to read. We may recoil in disgust at the cruelty of cock fighting and bear baiting, yet I wonder if, in 500 years, the Grand National will still be running.

Elizabeth I’s persecution, torture and execution of Roman Catholics looks primitive through modern eyes, but set against the political backdrop of Catholic assassination plots and the constant threat of foreign invasions endorsed by the Pope in Rome and it becomes understandable by the standards of the time. Keep your head down, religiously speaking, and there was little to fear through her 44-year reign, anyway.

Also bear in mind, while weighing up the beliefs and attitudes of the past, that opinions would have varied as much then as they do now, so the views of one writer in a particular text that happens to have survived the intervening years would not necessarily have been shared by all.

It is with this approach that Ian Mortimer triumphs. Using a heady mix of historical fact, original documents and intelligent guesswork, he pieces together not just how the Elizabethans lived but how they thought. And he charts the changes which have taken place since the Middle Ages – covered in The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England – such as a considerable improvement in hotel accommodation. A national lottery and smoking made their first appearances during Elizabeth’s reign, along with the earliest warnings that tobacco is a health hazard.

There are physical differences the 21st century time traveller will notice while wandering through Elizabethan England. Look at a field of grazing animals and they seem dwarf-like; ewes of 46lb compared with 200lb today; cows weighing 350lb against 1,600lb now. There were gross pay gaps, too, but no greater than the financial inequalities which exist now; a manual labourer’s average daily wage was 4d, a master craftsman 1s, a lawyer 6s and the Archbishop of Canterbury £7 7s, his £2,682 annual pot equivalent in today’s money to Bob Diamond’s Barclays salary of £9 million.

The Elizabethan era is the beginning of modern England, far-sighted enough to create a kind of welfare state. Until a special tax was introduced in 1597 to pay for job creation schemes the poor had either been punished, banished, or cared for by the Church. This piece of legislation, says Mortimer, is not as well known as the defeat of the Spanish Armada, but is just as historically important: “From this moment on, looking after the poor is a matter of secular social responsibility, paid for by taxation. It is no longer an act of religious charity.”

Mortimer prepares us to travel in time with guidance on what to wear and where to eat (the Willoughbys of Wollaton Hall near Nottingham, if you fancy pike) and he explains the common courtesies to be observed (a 1577 manual of manners frowns on laughing at your own jokes). All you have to do is climb aboard his time machine and enjoy a fascinating journey.

More worrying are the commemorations planned to mark the formations of many of the militias which emerged a century ago as the Home Rule crisis gripped Ireland. First off the mark will be Unionists, who plan a huge rally in Belfast later this month to mark the centenary of the Balmoral Review. This was an event in 1912 when Unionism’s anti-Home Rule champion, Edward Carson, held a review of thousands of armed members of his newly formed Ulster Volunteer Force. A year later, nationalists responded by launching the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army. Had it not been for the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Ireland was set for a bloody sectarian conflict between Unionists and nationalists.

Instead, those religious enemies joined forces and swelled the ranks of Irish regiments to fight in Europe’s blood-soaked trenches. German machine-guns did not distinguish between Unionists and nationalists during the Somme offensive in 1916. In Europe and Gallipoli, Unionists and nationalists fought – and died – side by side. They are also buried side by side in many First World War cemeteries. This poignant reminder seems to be lost amid the controversies surrounding the centenary commemorations for the signing of the anti-Home Rule Ulster Solemn League and Covenant.

To the generation of 2012, the Ulster Volunteer Force is a sectarian loyalist terror gang which emerged in the 1960s and was responsible for some of the biggest atrocities of the conflict.  Nationalists have become enraged by rumours that some Unionists plan to mark the Balmoral Review by parading in 1912 costumes, complete with imitation weapons. The fear is that the commemoration could turn into a show of strength for modern-day loyalist paramilitaries, such as the Ulster Defence Association, Red Hand Commandoes and Orange Volunteers.

Republicans also face a dilemma. With opinion polls showing an increase in support for Sinn Fein in the Republic Of Ireland, will republicans want to create a situation where they cannot march along Dublin’s main O’Connell Street in period costumes? Later this month, republicans will mark the 25th anniversary of the Loughgall ambush in which eight of the Provisional IRA’s top terrorists were shot dead by the SAS during a bomb and gun attack on the County Armagh village’s police barracks in 1987. The eight were members of the IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade and have become known as the Loughgall Martyrs in republican folklore.

Even the moderate Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party has become embroiled in a death controversy after one of its Assembly members was photographed carrying the coffin of former INLA and Official IRA activist Seamus Coyle. The coffin had been draped in the Red Starry Plough flag, a favourite emblem of the Marxist wing of Irish republicanism.  SDLP MLA Colum Eastwood has emphasised he carried the coffin because the dead former INLA man was a personal friend, but Unionist politicians have criticised his action.

With dissident republicans stepping up their bomb planting activities, many fear it will not be too long before the terrorist death toll rises. And Northern Ireland still has to get through this year’s contentious loyalist marching season.

Meanwhile, the search continues for the remains of the “disappeared”. These were people murdered and secretly buried in unmarked graves by republican terrorists. The bitter truth which politicians must face is that the future stability of the Irish peace process will not depend on the actions of the living, but how people commemorate the dead.  This will spark a new debate on what constitutes “an innocent victim of the conflict” in Ireland. Are some of the dead more honourable than others? More importantly, are there any such people as “martyrs for peace”?

These facts are scandalous in themselves. But what is more horrifying is the fact that there is no legal requirement relating to staffing levels. Hospitals can get away with what they decide is “safe” and in these days of severe budget restraints it seems to be fewer and fewer qualified staff.

The NHS is struggling to keep up with costs of new drugs, the ageing population, and looming lifestyle challenges such as the growing incidence of obesity. These pressures are compounded by the need to make savings of £20 billion by 2014. An easy way to make savings is at the expense of the staff, knowing that their dedication and professionalism means they will work extra hours unpaid to ensure the best care for their patients. The survey, carried out by Unison, showed nursing staff under severe pressure to cope with the numbers of patients and their complex and varied medical needs.  The vast majority of staff said they did not have enough time with patients and three quarters said they did not have an adequate amount of time to deliver “dignified, safe and compassionate care”. This is nothing new. As long ago as 2009, the Health Select Committee stated that “inadequate staffing levels have been major factors in undermining patient safety in a number of cases”.

A year later, in 2010, the Royal College of Nursing, in its Guidance on Safe Nurse Staffing Levels in the UK report, called for the systems used for planning nurse staffing to be subject to “the same level of scrutiny that NICE applies to specific health care interventions”. It argued that: “In the current financial context, there is a real danger that healthcare providers will look to reduce staffing as a means of achieving long-term savings”.

Quality of care, patient safety and patient outcomes have all risen up the political agenda in the past few years with multiple initiatives aimed at raising standards. Research evidence shows that staffing levels of nurses make a huge difference to care, safety and outcomes.

Yet still, although hospitals must comply with regulations ensuring patients are treated in an environment with safe staffing levels, there is no law as to what those safe levels are.

Although the number of nurses in the NHS has increased in recent years, so has bed occupancy and patient throughput. So capacity increases have absorbed much of this additional staff and there is no evidence to suggest that NHS ward level staffing has improved. “We know very little about the extent to which nurse staffing is being proactively planned using robust systems”, says the RCN report. “There has not been a recent review of the systems available and they have not been tested for their reliability or validity.”

The Government’s new Nursing and Care Quality Forum has set up an online consultation inviting suggestions from healthcare staff and the public on the best way of delivering “the fundamental elements of good care – compassion, dignity, respect and safety – first time, every time and to everyone” and “providing the very highest quality of care through supporting the adoption of best practice and promoting innovation”. Maybe this platform could be used to push forward the need for set staff to patient ratios. You can have your say – before May 11 – on www.dh.gov.uk/health/nursing-form/.

While the RCN has called on the Government to introduce effective systems to plan nurse staffing and prevent shortages, Unison has gone one step further and is calling for legislation setting minimum staff to patient ratios.

Christine McAnea, Unison’s head of health, is right when she says that it is time the Government acts on the evidence which clearly demonstrates that mandatory staffing levels are directly associated with a reduction in patient deaths and introduces legally set staffing ratios.

Here the press is currently under a different kind of spotlight. The African National Congress is pressing ahead with its draconian State Information Bill (better known as the Secrecy Bill).  In recent years, the nastiest political scandals and revelations of corruption have only come to light thanks to a probing press. The Secrecy Bill will make most such exposés almost impossible. As a result, the temptation might be for the press to retreat to the successful Murdiocrity formula: a diet of celebrity tittle-tattle while cosying up to the government in return for commercial favours.

Blade Nzimande, our Minister of Higher Education and the South African Communist Party boss, has even ludicrously claimed that the press is the greatest threat to democracy here. He, along with other ministers, has been exposed for lavish state spending on luxury hotels and expensive limousines. The hypocrisy is that some of the most damaging reports of ministerial misconduct have been leaked by rivals within the ANC as part of fierce factional power struggles.

We had our own mini Leveson inquiry here over a decade ago. In 2000, the Human Rights Commission conducted

a wide-raging, highly publicised investigation into the South African press. Editors were grilled; at times berated. There was one glaring omission: the Irish tycoon Tony O’Reilly, proprietor of our largest newspaper group, Independent Newspapers, wasn’t summoned.  At the time, O’Reilly used to meet then President Thabo Mbeki regularly as he sat on Mbeki’s panel of economic advisors. Mbeki was second to none in denouncing the iniquities of the press. He could easily have had a quiet word with Tony O’Reilly, but probably never did.

For years Tony O’Reilly, then his son Gavin, sucked out most of the profits from their South African papers to shore up increasing losses back home. It was, in its way, a very colonial attitude. But you don’t hear that from our politicians. Instead you hear howls of outrage when, despite the lack of funding, local newspapers shed light on ministerial delinquency. Recently, after a corporate tussle in Ireland, Gavin O’Reilly resigned. South Africa’s biggest newspaper group is now in limbo.

Who will take over? Gavin O’Reilly’s departure as chief executive of Independent News & Media follows a long, acrimonious dispute with major fellow shareholder Denis O’Brien, the Irish telecoms billionaire. O’Brien was the subject of an official enquiry following the awarding of a mobile phone licence to him in 1996 in controversial circumstances.

The Moriarty Tribunal concluded that it was likely that large payments (£447,000 via third parties and offshore accounts) to Michael Lowry, then Irish Communications Minister, unduly influenced the bidding process. O’Brien, a tax exile in Malta, bitterly disputes those allegations. Yet he now appears to be in pole position to decide the fate of South Africa’s largest newspaper group.

This highlights the fact that, both in South Africa and Britain, the heart of this debate over media ethics should be less about the behaviour of individual reporters and more about the codes of newspaper ownership. One obvious answer is: curb the power of the plutocrats. Look at recent British press barons: Robert Maxwell, Conrad Black and Richard Desmond. Rupert Murdoch, of course, has for decades been the undisputed king of that unsavoury roost.

This is the Murdoch paradox: were he a reporter on The Sun, practising the shifty ethics he has fostered his entire career and repeating the kind of whoppers he lobbed up to Leveson, Murdoch might now be unemployable, if not actually under arrest. But as a global media magnate, who has promoted many of the most sordid media excesses of the modern era, he is treated at worst as an incorrigible but audacious rogue – and at the Leveson inquiry, even to sycophantic laughter.

Just, oh please, don’t let the Dirty Digger come here next.

Like many an obituary notice, this one proved embarrassingly premature. History, apparently pickled in formaldehyde, suddenly began to accelerate. The fall of the World Trade Centre, the so-called war on terror, the United States torture-and-murder machine, imperial warfare in Iraq

and Afghanistan, a global capitalist crisis, general strikes and mass demonstrations, whole nations in revolt, the spread of popular anti-capitalist protest, the Arab Spring: who would have foreseen any of this during the countdown to the new millennium? History was now moving so fast that it was hard for political organisation to keep up with it. Theory was forced to hobble hard to keep abreast of practice. Whole nations began to go bust. A majority of young Americans declared they preferred socialism to capitalism. The true dreamers were now the hard-nosed pragmatists for whom nothing spectacular could ever happen.

One sign of this political shift was that capitalists suddenly began to use the word “capitalism”. This is always an ill-advised thing for our rulers to do. It is far better for them to speak of the free world, free enterprise or liberal democracy. To use the word “capitalist” is to acknowledge that there is a system around, and if there is one system in place, there can always be another. Besides, to say “capitalism” is to remind ourselves that the way of life under which we live is of fairly recent vintage. Systems are born, and whatever is born can also die. They also have limits, which for most of the time are largely invisible. What renders those limits freshly perceptible is a crisis of the system. It is then that we become conscious of it as a specific entity with its own peculiar laws. It ceases to be the invisible colour of everyday life, too close to the eyeball to be grasped as a whole. Crises are thus bad for business in more senses than one. In drawing attention to the inner workings of the market, they make it seem less natural and inevitable than it once appeared. Just as breaking your leg means never being able to overlook its nagging presence, so a breakdown of the system means that we cease to take it for granted. And this is bad news for those who govern it.

Seeing the system for what it is, of course, is not the same as changing it. As far as that goes, the political left faces a major paradox. What brought about the current crisis of capitalism is the fact that in the decades before the crash, the system was allowed to buck wildly out of control. It was riding for a fall, but believed it was invincible. In the wake of its triumph in the Cold War, the West could see no limits to its sovereignty. It was this arrogance which caused it to overreach itself. Capitalism had packed off its traditional rivals, but ignored the fact that its true enemy lay in itself. As Marx once observed, the limit on the expansion of capitalism is capital itself. In a fit of megalomania, the system had forgotten that it was finite. And this, in Greek tragedy at least, is always the moment when the gods step in and deal humanity a death-blow, just to remind people how puny and fragile they

really are.

The paradox for the left, however, is this. The rabid over-confidence which finally brought the system low also took the form of stamping on the left when the system was still booming. Socialism was a casualty of the West’s faith in its own invincibility. Convinced that it could carry all before it, a newly aggressive capitalism rolled back the labour movement and scattered and demoralised its opponents. Those who deserted the banners of the left in the 1980s and ’90s did so, for the most part, not because they were suddenly convinced of the wisdom of bankers and the righteousness of stockbrokers, but because they now considered the system too powerful to break. It was disillusionment with the possibility of change, not a change of heart about market society itself, which caused most of these erstwhile militants to stash away their placards along with their denim suits. If only they had managed to hang on for another few years, they would have witnessed a moment when capitalism was so formidably powerful that it could only just keep the cash machines open on the high streets. But it is disheartening to fight a form of life which you suspect in your heart is here to stay. No one can survive for too long without some meagre crumbs of faith and hope. It is easy to forget in times of political stalemate that the most distinctive fact about history, not least the turbulent history of capitalism, is that it never stands still. That is no guarantee that the future will be better than the present. All we know is that it will be different.

The left, then, confronts a crisis, which is always an opportunity for it. But what helped to bring the crisis about also helped to throw the left itself on to the back foot. So it squares up to the situation in relatively poor shape. It also finds itself the victim of its own history. Why have the hordes of disaffected young people who have taken to the streets in recent years not turned spontaneously to socialist ideas? There are several answers to that, but one of them we ignore at our peril is the squalid history of Stalinism. The left is still too historically close to that poisonous legacy to appear uncontaminated by it. And this applies even to those brave leftist currents which fought Stalinism wherever it raised its head.

Just as the system overreached itself in the boom years, so it did in the so-called war on terror. Flushed with its own global victories, the post-Cold War West announced that all history had now come to an end. All that lay ahead was its own eternal self-reproduction. It was this manic belief in its own omnipotence that drove it to ride roughshod over weaker nations, not least in the Muslim world; and it was this intensified assault which then led to the backlash of radical Islam. The irony of this is hard to overestimate. The very belief that history had closed down caused it to spring open again. This is why the fall of the World Trade Centre followed on the end of the Cold War and the West’s global supremacy. Once again, the system proved most vulnerable just when it seemed most impregnable.

There is no easy strategic lesson that the left can draw from these ironies and contradictions. We know, at least, that we no longer need to spend so much energy in trying to discredit the current system. It has proved perfectly capable of doing that all by itself. We also know, however, that as long as any political system is still capable of providing enough of its citizens with even a meagre amount of satisfaction, it is likely to survive for a while longer. The opposite, however, is also true. Once any system can no longer yield that satisfaction to enough if its members, they are likely to revolt against it as surely as night follows day.

We are a long way from that point at present. But we are also a long way from the year 2000. New forms of dissidence have sprung up and, for the first time since the miners’ strike, a whole younger generation is newly aware of radical politics. They are also aware that we live in a civilisation that can no longer afford to educate its young which is why, for the first time since the late 1960s, colleges and universities are becoming arenas of political militancy. I recently did a tour of some English universities to speak about Marxism and noted that even at Oxford, in the very belly of the beast, some 200 people had to be turned away from a packed meeting. Ten years ago, speaking on this subject, one would have been lucky to collect 200 in the whole tour. Today, however, a great many young people have seen through this corrupt way of life, are conscious that it has no place for their talents, and are deeply furious at its blatant injustices. It is not the Paris Commune or the Winter Palace. But it is not business as usual, either.

Terry Eagleton is Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster, a former Thomas Warton Professor of English at Oxford, and the author of more than 40 books on language, literature, politics and religion. The Event of Literature (Yale University Press, £18.99) has just been published in hardback while Why Marx Was Right (Yale, £10.99) and Reason, Faith, and Revolution (Yale, £10.99) are now available in paperback