Reblogged from Michael Meacher MP:
Since the last world war, now 70 years ago, there have been only two seismic
events in the West which have changed the course of politics. One was the
counter-revolution at the end of the 1970s against Keynesian economics and
social democracy, and that ushered in the free market fundamentalism that
dominated the Western economies and much of the world beyond for the next 3
decades. The second was the global financial crash of 2008-9 which over the
ensuing decade has driven the deepest recession for a century. The former
however transformed the prevailing ideology whilst the latter, arguably the most
devastating economic catastrophe since the Wall Street crash of 1929 which
inaugurated the misery and despair of the 1930s, has produced no such reaction.
Many reasons have been asserted for this, but probably the most poignant is
the absorption of the radical and Left parties into the neoliberal concordance
during the time of its triumphalism when deregulated markets and the Washington
consensus seemed impregnable. That world is now broken beyond repair. Yet
that hasn’t stopped the political and economic establishments of all parties
from striving mightily to restore it. But that is not only impossible, it’s
also irrational.
The world economy was growing at about 3% a year per capita in the ‘bad old
days’ of widespread regulation and ‘punitive’ taxation for the rich in the
1960-70s, but in the last 30 years when unfettered markets dominated it has
grown at only half that rate. In Britain the average annual per capita income
growth in the 1960-70s was 2.4% when the country was allegedly suffering from
the ‘British disease’, but since 1990 after Thatcher had supposedly cured the
country of the disease and fought heroic struggles in the 1980s, income growth
even before the crash has fallen to just 1.7% a year. The decade and a half of
uninterrupted growth, low and stable inflation, and falling unemployment after
1992 was not, we now know, a sign of the magic of neoliberal doctrines, but
rather of their deeply flawed dependence on consumption-driven boom and bust.
On every other key criterion too – competitiveness, inequalities of wealth,
economic imbalances, and social and environmental standards – Britain fared much
worse in the 30 years following the Thatcherite counter-insurgency after 1980
than in the 30 years of managed capitalism that preceded it.
Party conference next week is the perfect opportunity to make that case loud
and clear. Ed Miliband aspires to ‘responsible capitalism’, which is certainly
not what all the political parties seem resigned to – the reconfiguration of the
broken down neoliberal version. But he needsto spell out in some detail what
he means by it. In that vacuum which still remains unfilled I have just
published a new book, ‘The State We Need: Keys to the Renaissance of Britain’
(with the link http://bit.ly/1dHBiNj) which sets out comprehensively what
that alternative scenario would look like.
