EU: Socialism Rises Again – But How Green?
If you thought that the old Socialist Left was dead and gone, a look at France this week will tell you you otherwise. A wave of strikes has occurred in protest at what is seen by a growing number of French workers as the Sarkozy government’s mishandling of measures to limit the impact of the recession.
The administration is increasingly thought of as favouring large payments to the very bankers who got us into this mess, while being prepared to allow ordinary workers’ jobs to go en masse. Very likely the Left strongholds in the South will link up with disaffected urban youth across the country and particularly in Paris: a powerful combination. The people protesting this week have not been particularly encouraged by the opposition Socialist party, either, which they see as little different to Sarkozy’s centre-right administration, much as those on the traditional Left regard “New Labour” in Britain. Street protests have brought French governments down in the past: they will doubtless do so again.
That feeling – that bankers get enormous bailouts while ordinary people go to the wall – is not solely a working class concern. Jim Rogers (a former confederate of George Soros, one of the few people who in my view really knows what is going on) recently opined that it was wrong for the British government to be bailing out the banks and that instead they should be allowed to go bust. Only by doing so, he suggested, would the country be able to start with a clean slate; the present course, on the other hand, would lead to debts that could take a generation or more to pay off.
It’s difficult to say what would happen if the banks were simply allowed to collapse – the cure might be worse than the disease – but certainly there is some merit in looking further in that direction. In the wake of the S&L scandal in the US in the late 1980s, the institutions were allowed to go bust but the government then picked up the assets. I am no economist, but that has always sounded like a good way to go from my point of view.
We are seeing the start of an Old Left-leaning backlash to the de-regulation and greed introduced first by Thatcher and Reagan and continued unchecked by successive US and British governments and elsewhere in Europe. Indeed, the rise of Thatcherism arguably pushed the British political consensus so far to the Right that Blair’s “New Labour” government was further to the Right than the Conservatives under Heath.
But now nationalisation is back on the agenda on both sides of the Atlantic; regulation is being looked on more favourably; and a question in many peoples’ minds is whether it is actually a good idea to prop up the organisations who got us into this mess and allow them to continue to pay obscene bonuses to the very people who have wrought so much hardship on ordinary people. Letting the banks go bust and leaving it at that might not be an option, but letting them go bust and then nationalising the workable remains might be a strategy. And well, how many banks do we actually need?
