How can Labour still fear to act for a fairer, greener land?

[TrueBlueTerrier]

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Casino capitalism has proved rotten at its core, and people are crying out for ideas. A bolder Brown could transform society

In the middle of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-8, when currencies in east Asia were halving in value in weeks, and millions of people were being thrown out of work as their economies went from boom to basket case in the space of a month, I was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where I interviewed Deutsche Bank's senior economist about what had gone wrong.

Nothing, he said, laconically. Capitalism was a lottery, and anyone who worked within it had bought a ticket. What, I asked him, about all the teachers and civil servants, small businessmen and employees whose lives had been wrecked for the next year or two, and possibly for a decade, as they paid back their countries' sudden debts? He shrugged. That was the deal. You won some, you lost some, and if you happened to lose out for the rest of your life, well, that was the risk.

I listened to this indifference with incredulity and dismay, but also with a sense of detachment. Terrible things were happening to people in faraway places, because their economies expanded too fast, or were corrupted by crony capitalism. We in the west were insulated from such shocks.

Now we know exactly what it is like to be living with such instability. Millions of us who thought we had solid lives are going to find we're holding losing tickets. Few of us feel immune. And the fear about what might happen to us has forced a sudden reassessment of what we value. The new status symbols aren't expensive cars or flashy watches; they're being in possession of a home and a job. For years, we all hungered for more; now we'd happily settle for keeping what we've got. We're in panicky retreat from risk, only we don't know where to go.

The real shock is that a Labour government is neither reading accurately nor responding intelligently to this change of mood. It knows we want jobs and security. That is why it is frantically trying to stabilise the banking system, construct loan and insurance schemes and promise more jobs. But there is no sense that it is using this crisis to rethink the way we live, work, or gobble up the world's resources. Instead, it is evincing a devout desire to get the old system of high-consumption, high-risk capitalism back on track, as quickly as possible. The astounding decision to expand Heathrow, and the imminent decision to part-privatise the Royal Mail are just the latest examples of that.

A consultant currently working with the Treasury says, brutally, that far from being too interventionist, the government is reacting too slowly to every stage of the crisis because it is reluctant to accept how far the existing system has been smashed up. It keeps hoping that, as long as the banks are bailed out, hectored, regulated or nudged, everything will start working again much as it did before. It won't, he says. But ministers are too busy firefighting to have the urgent and necessary discussion about what the alternative social and economic models might be.

What's so galling about this lack of a new direction is that there are plenty of better models of how to organise a capitalist society out there. We could look to Europe, given that our Anglo-Saxon model has left us so much more exposed to risk than many of our neighbours. Perhaps we might learn from the French, who severely restrict all access to consumer credit, or from the Germans, who escape housing booms because most of them rent. Or we could pick up on the proposals spilling out of thinktanks here. The New Economics Foundation, for instance, has published two pamphlets since the crash, outlining measures that could be taken right now to create a more resilient, fairer and greener Britain. What unites them is an emphasis on predictability and sustainability. Safe is the new sexy.

One proposal is to reverse the scandalous mass closures of post offices, and use them as the basis of a new, trustworthy, people's bank - reviving local communities, and faith in state-run institutions. Another suggests big public projects like schools and hospitals should in the future be funded not by the rapacious private-public partnership schemes, but by a People's Pension Fund. Individuals paying into the fund would not be dependent on precarious financial markets for their futures but would get a steady return from government rents. An economist floats the prospect of a maximum wage, pointing out that JP Morgan, the founder of the company, believed that no firm should pay its highest earner more than 10 times the wage of the lowest - and that the Royal Navy runs on a ratio of eight. From the funding of credit unions to timebanks, local energy advisers, taxes on financial speculation and penalties for environmentally damaging companies, there is the start of a real programme here.

Some ministers are very conscious that this could be a turning point. At the Fabian conference this weekend, the climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, told his audience that this was an opportunity to write the future. He called for bold ideas, a different kind of state where power was dispersed rather than concentrated, and for us to decide how we valued and safeguarded what markets couldn't provide.

Yet later in the weekend, another cabinet minister told me that he feared the leadership could not really grasp the necessary scale of change. It was hard, the minister said, to step back and acknowledge how much was wrong when you had also been responsible for the past 11 years. Labour had been so in thrall to market values and so determined to suppress its beliefs about the poisonous nature of widening inequality that it was difficult to be freed to think differently. But doing so was imperative, because all the government's assumptions about improving society had been based on eternal growth. A shrinking economy would make all future political decisions - particularly any efforts at redistribution - far tougher.

The urgency of this has to be understood. For the last 30 years the values of casino capitalism have dominated the way we think. Now we are discovering, every day, how rotten it is at the core. Our old assumptions about states, markets, how to live, and what to hope for have all been thrown in the air. We are desperate for, and open to, ideas that would have been unthinkable six months ago.

Few politicians ever get the chance to reshape societies at a time of fracture. Attlee seized the moment, and so did Thatcher. I see no signs that Brown has the imagination to do so; can he be persuaded, by his cabinet and by outsiders, to rise to this tremendous challenge?

jenni.russell@guardian.co.uk

[Broxi51]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... capitalism



Few politicians ever get the chance to reshape societies at a time of fracture. Attlee seized the moment, and so did Thatcher. I see no signs that Brown has the imagination to do so; can he be persuaded, by his cabinet and by outsiders, to rise to this tremendous challenge?

jenni.russell@guardian.co.uk

In a word NO. Brown doesnt have any vision. He is akin to the little boy with his finger in the hole of a wall as more and more holes appear and the water escaping goes from a dribble into free fall. His so called decisiveness led us into this mess and his vision is to chuck money at the major institutions that helped him ruin this country. His vision is that part privatising Royal Mail will lead to our salvation whilst seemingly ignorant of the fact that these investors will be happy to ruin Royal Mail and take the whole lot at a bargain bin price. It is time for Brown to F*CK OFF and take Mandy, Darling and the rest of the Blackadder wannabes with him.

[Big Daz]

It is time for Brown to F*CK OFF and take Mandy, Darling and the rest of the Blackadder wannabes with him.