The crisis: left, right and centre

Wien1938

A vital point that the author has missed is to acknowledge that the European Union has continued in a pseudo-corporatist economic model.
It has transferred the risks of national banks onto the books of the member states. Taxpayers are not just going to bail out private banks but profligate governments.

A separate point worth making is that there has been a "right wing" counter argument to the bailout/banks strategy since it began which was concentrate on the supply of money in the economy. I refer any reader to Tim Congdon and others.

Bill Due

Your analysis of the economic "war" reveals the very leftist assumptions that caused government to distort to breaking point the market economy and got us into the mess we are in. Banks (USA) were incentivized by government to "run riot", and then not allowed to fail. The market was not allowed to clear itself of non-performing business. As for the idea that unequal wealth distribution is the cause of government debt - it is an economic fairy tale. It is precisely the egalitarian urge that has turned government into a rapacious borrower to finance its social balancing.

So I would say that the left has "won" politically, and therefore economically. The victory - destruction of the evil patriarchy - is coming along nicely. The center, being half-way between rationality and idiocy, is itself idiotic - an apt description of our culture.

MattT

Yes this article pretty much sums up the degree to which past assumptions have been overtaken by reality.

'I think it is fair to say that conservatives have yet to come to terms with the collapse of their illusions.'

Absolutely. The collapse of the banks was quite simply not supposed to happen according to free market ideology. It held that stability and prosperity could be brought about if 'economic man' followed his 'rational' self interest.

Actually, the self interest of high finance has led to mass insecurity and has destroyed vast amounts of wealth. They have used their power to make ordinary people pay for their mindless greed.

The free market fundamentalists on this site won't agree with any of this of course. They place the blame for the current crisis on Labour's economic record in office, ignorantly failing to recognise that Labour's mistake was to buy into the prevailing free market consensus.

Gordon Brown was converted to the delusion that in a globalised free marked growth would continue indefinately. In reality the deregulated free market allowed bankers to bring the whole system down by making bad loans, forcing the state to take on their bad debts. Now they are using their privileged global position to prevent effective reform by threatening to move abroad.

Of course conservatives still parrot their deluded catechisms instead of confronting the reality of what has happened to the economy in the last three decades.

Archibald

Some of the observations in your blog may be accurate, but as left, right and centre could be defined in so many ways the actual saying itself isn't worth the quotation marks surrounding it. All that it encapsulates is the 20th and 21st century obsession with largely meaningless soundbites.

I very much look forward to your next piece on the decline of English football versus continental teams, entitled 'They Don't Like It Up 'Em - Or Do They?'

Rhoda Klapp

I am not aware of any right-wing position which states that you don't need to regulate banks properly. Read Adam Smith, for starters. Or that the government must take over banks' debts. They have to be subject to moral hazard. Everything you rail against here may be summed up as wetness. Tory wetness, new labour wetness, whatever. But you are right to single out the BBC, wetter than the Atlantic, but nowhere near as deep.

David Lindsay

Are you recanting your participation in the alliance, definitively around support for the Iraq War, between the unrepentant old Communists and Trotskyists of the 1970s, and the unrepantant old Pretoria and Santiago hands of the 1980s?

It is good to see you edging into the Eurosceptical camp. The EU subjects us to the legislative will of the sorts of people that turn up in the European Parliament and in the coalitions represented in the Council of Ministers. Stalinists and Trotskyists. Neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis. Members of Eastern Europe's kleptomaniac nomenklatura. Neoconservatives such as now run France and Germany. Before long, the ruling Islamists of Turkey. And their opponents, variously extreme secular ultra-nationalists and Marxist Kurdish separatists.

When Jörg Haider's party was in government in Austria, the totally unreconstructed Communist Party was in government in France. In the Council of Ministers, we were being legislated for by both of them. In the European Parliament, we still are, because we always are. People who believe the Provisional Army Council to be the sovereign body throughout Ireland may not take their seats at Westminster. But they do at Strasbourg.

And so on, and on, and on.

Erica Blair

Cohen writes, '...they could not defend liberalism against Islamists'

...and there's me thinking he could write a post without having a pop a Muslims.

Stephen Rothbart

Erica, that was a legitimate comment in the full context of the piece written.

No one can deny that many Islamic tenets condemn women to a second class status, that they forbid homosexual congress, and that in claiming Islam to be the superior religion, and in banning other religions (including variations of their own religion) or discriminating against them throughout the Middle East, it is racist.

Certain aspects of Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism also have an element of racism about them, but most have moved on from homophobia and supression of females. Both now even have leading clerics that are female.

Also only Islam contains apostacy to the extremes that many on the extreme wings of Islam go to.

Not all Muslims follow any of those paths of intolerance, but many do, and at a time when a religious anti-Semitic preacher has just strolled past our Border Police to give speeches organised by Left-Wing politicians, and the Left leaning media and educational authorities invite these extremists to give vent to their odious opinions all over Europe, it is surely entirely relevant to question how the Left, which is supposed to be in the vanguard of liberal tolerance, finds itself on the same side as the religious bigots and misogynists they are supposed to oppose.

Sir Graphus

The banks collapsed because, as you said yourself, Nick, Brown did not, as all Tory chancellors had, that bankers’ gambles can bankrupt the country.

Furthermore, the sovereign debt crisis is entirely born from socialist govts increasing govt spending without taking on the electoral inconvenience of the consequent necessary tax increases.

Jonathan Woolf

Others have made similar points but quite how the banking and sovereign debt crisis shows that right wing economics was wrong is beyond me.

In the UK, a Labour government was in power from 1997 onwards. It made the BoE independent on interest rates, allowing it to over-inflate the economy and ignore asset price inflation during the boom years. It created the regulatory regime that failed its first test (in contrast to the previous one which survived, amongst other things, the 1920s, 1930s, and WWII). It made the banking crisis much worse by adopting socialist solutions to failed banking businesses - nationalizing Northern Rock and RBS instead of winding them up and stuffing HBOS into a decent bank, Lloyds TSB, and wrecking it into the process.

Coddling big business (whether car manufacturers or banks) is a socialist / corporatist approach. Free marketeers recognize the difference between support for the market and support for established big business. Free market economics requires deregulation, competition, democratic restraints on unions, elimination of moral hazard, no hidden government guarantees, free trade, and business being disciplined by unrestricted takeovers and insolvency.

The 2008 fiscal and banking crisis is entirely a crisis made by Brown, Balls, and the socialists in the EU.

Augustus

Stephen Rothbart - Well said! It's been clear for some time that in the new Europe the “right-wing” badge will be pinned most enthusiastically on those opposed to Islamization. The obvious reason why the
Euroleft are prostrate before Islam is because they are now increasingly dependent on the Muslim vote, which they hope will guarantee them a perpetual foothold at least in the major population centres.

Jerry Owen

What was wrong with our old order, that has sufficed us for centuries?
I'll tell you why, it didn't suit the 'progressives'.
Human nature over politicians corruption ( moral and financial )given a fair playing field is the natural order.

Jerry Owen

Erica Bliar or is that Blair?
Are you a muslim convert? It appears to me that most of if not all your posts are infatuated with attacking the author as an Islamophobe....whatever that is. Or is your agenda fifth columnist in egging on division amongst cultures?

O. Puhleez

I think it is rather a case of three myopias, or three roads all leading to disaster.

The Left's obsession with the US led it to believe that alliance with anyone who was anti-US and UK ('Blair') was the way to go. This led them in turn to support the Islamists and 'respect' for Islam's worst vices. On the way to that they supported Galtieri's invasion of the Falklands in reflexive opposition to Thatcher.

The Right's apparent obsession with the idea of free markets was for propaganda purposes only. There never has been an unregulated or deregulated market. There has only ever been selective deregulation, under which class opponents get deregulated, and class cronies keep their perks. And so, the economic irrationalist banksters got bailed out, and set up to start all over again. Greed remains exalted.

The Centre hovers between, looking for a golden mean and 'balance': the refuge that lies somwhere between the frying pan and the fire.

Sir Graphus

The mistake in using the phrase "won the war" is to imagine that the war is at any point over.

History is ongoing, and ideas have their day in the sun, before being developed further or discarded in light of events.

2011 looks different to 2008. Capitalism needs fettering, we now know. Doesn't mean socialism is right.

The left was in the ascendancy in education from 1960 onwards, but this may be turning around now. Traditional lefty multiculturalsim has also had a long run.

Andy Gill

Erica Blair

"...and there's me thinking he could write a post without having a pop a Muslims."

Except that he didn't. He said that Islamists are racist, homophobic and misogynist.

Which they are. Islamism is a supremacist neo-fascist ideology.

Iain

It is necessary to accept that the BBC is at all times an establishment propaganda machine. This can be tested each and every day. Note this week's Athens coverage, indoctrinating us all into the EU view, demonizing the poor Greeks for refusing to bow to the establishment wish for austerity. Where was a cogent analysis of the benefits of the default/drachma option, so alien to the mandarins of Brussels?

Frank P

Well, at least one Spectator writer has confessed to being a Gramsci disciple; perhaps the rest will now come out of the closet.

They might even try to drag the Prime Minister out with them?

Fergus Pickering

Gramsci was some lefty Italian, wasn't he? Explain his relevance to anyone at all. I think Erica is a bearded man.

Bill Due

"I think Erica is a bearded man."

Erica Blair and Georgina Orwell could be the same persona - offering a soft female alternative to political intelligence.

Richard

Iain,

Do you think the poor British should bow to the establishment wish for austerity?