Larry Elliott welcomes Paul Mason's new book
Meltdown, because it takes forward the urgent
task facing the left of developing a coherent
alternative to neoliberalism. But Elliott urges
us also to seek solutions to the climate and
energy crisis simultaneously with the financial crisis.
It's the end of an era. Things will never be the
same again. The age of neoliberalism is dead. How
many times have we heard those pat phrases these
past 18 months or so as what started as a little
local difficulty in the US housing market
developed into the biggest financial crisis since
the Great Depression. There are certainly good
reasons for the left to believe that the tide has
at last turned after three decades in which the
right has been in the ascendancy. As Paul Mason
illustrates in this excellent account of the
humbling of the former masters of the universe,
the crash was the consequence of 'giant hubris
and the untrammelled power of a financial elite'.
The events of 2007-09 have been big financeâs
equivalent of the British labour movement's
'winter of discontent' 30 years previously.
Public disgust at the excesses and incompetence
of the bankers has meant there has rarely been a
better time for a radical shift leftwards in
politics. But it is one thing saying the
conditions are ripe for change, another thing
altogether bringing that change about.
Think about it for a second. Ever since the
crisis began, the prime aim of governments most
notabbly Gordon Brownâs has been to put the
genie back in the bbottle. There is nothing the
prime minister would like more than to return to
life as it was in June 2007, when, on the eve of
moving into 10 Downing Street, he used his
Mansion House speech to praise the 'ingenuity and
creativity' of the City, contrasting Britain's
light-touch regulation with the heavy-handed
approach favoured by the Americans.
As a result, the government went to extraordinary
lengths to avoid nationalising Northern Rock and
has taken other parts of the financial sector
into part or full state ownership only with
extreme reluctance. It is even ploughing on with
the deeply unpopular part-privatisation of the Royal Mail.
<http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Meltdown-politics>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/06/paul-masons-meltdown-developing.htm>monochrom
at 6/27/2009 02:46:00 PM
