"There is no alternative." Remember that one?

"There is no alternative." Remember that one?

It is what Margaret Thatcher said at the height of the recession of the early 1980s to justify her economic policy.

But that recession wasn't an unforeseeable and unstoppable tsunami any more than this one is.

That recession, if not politically generated, was used, with malice aforethought, by Margaret Thatcher's government to remove any counterbalancing political, economic, social and cultural centres of power that might offer an alternative to the dominance of the City of London [global financial services] in the UK - those counterweights being the industrial and manufacturing city-regions, mostly centre-left politically.

And that is exactly how we've got ourselves into the fine mess we are in now.

Because since then there has been no world view, and no point of view from which to have it, that carried enough weight to say

"Umm. Err. Umm. Err. Maybe letting 28-year-olds make massive bets with other people's money, pay themselves billions of pounds of bonuses based on what they claim the bets are going to win some time in the future, retire at 35 to set up an organic single estate first press olive oil importing business because they've always been passionate about the finest ingredients, and leave everybody else to face the consequences when the bets not only don't win but turn out never to have had any way of winning except by using them to make more bets and pay more bonuses, might not be the only possible way to run a country."

Comments

[Lee]

That last paragraph ("...Maybe letting 28-year-olds make massive bets..." etc.) is the best summary of the situation I've heard yet!