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Larry Elliott |
Don’t bank on a revolutionary middle class!
I MIXED with members of the middle class on Monday night – the class the police and some Cabinet members fear will go on the rampage in the summer as the economic slump gets worse.
They weren’t muttering “revolution” but there was something in the air. Perhaps the very topic chosen by the Guardian newspaper for a public discussion, “Capitalism in Crisis – Can we fix it?” – had pulled in the sort of people who might mount the barricades in the months to come.
Sitting in the foyer of the newly opened Kings Place, the comfortably modern “Barbican” of King’s Cross, the middle-class malcontents were all around me. They were eager to hear the experts on the crisis, eager enough to pay £11.50 for the privilege.
I was soon drawn towards to a man with a lovely lilting Glaswegian accent, Moeen Yaseen, who, with messianic fervour, was lecturing an elderly couple at my table about how banks operate. In the old days, most of their loans were drawn from deposits – today, their loans came from other loans. Do you know, he asked me later, that the money held by the Federal Bank of America is controlled by JP Morgan and Rockefeller – not by the US government?
Minutes later I entered the hall along with 300 other would-be revolutionaries to hear the panel paint a doom-and-gloom picture. But there was no alternative to capitalism, they all agreed.
Philosopher John Gray, who lectures at the LSE, gave swift brush strokes of the crisis and the “barrels of dynamite”, that is, mountains of debt, held by the banks. Gray had another expression to describe these banks: “Gambling joints.”
Everyone, even the Queen, has asked why no one saw the crisis coming. In fact, two or three finance people had, said Gray – among them the tycoon George Soros who had warned of the impending disaster years ago.
Readers may be surprised to discover that Soros started out in his twenties working as a salesman for Camden’s ex-finance chief and businessman John Mills, in his company’s basement office in Albert Street, Camden Town. Soros has got big since then, of course.
Gray thought academics and economists had been “institutionalised” and unable to see what was going on around them.
In some countries there could be a “regime change”, especially in eastern Europe. Minorities faced being scapegoated.
Another panellist, Terry Smith, a chief executive of a company, said he wrote a book warning of the coming disaster in 1992, and was sacked for his sins.
Questions came thick and fast from the audience, but the chairman, Larry Elliott, the Guardian’s economics editor, didn’t appear eager for a debate.
A woman, introducing herself as Jo Patten, a Labour activist, asked whether there was an alternative to capitalism. I assumed she was hinting at a kind of socialist society. Her question went unanswered. Fred Jervis, former head of the National Union of Teachers, and a senior TUC member, who lives in Barnet, asked a similar question.
It’s true capitalism is failing, opined the panellists, things would even get worse. But eventually capitalism would come out of the vortex. But no one knew when.
After 90 minutes the audience left quietly, albeit anxiously – and the revolution had been postponed for another day.
Bakewell’s on frontline to promote debut novel
SOME 60 years after her sixth-form teacher told her she was not good enough to study English, I watched Dame Joan Bakewell regale an appreciative audience at Cecil Sharp House, Regent’s Park Road, with extracts from her first novel last night (Wednesday).
The broadcaster and journalist gave her only London talk about the Second World War yarn, All the Nice Girls, as a favour to her local bookshop, Primrose Hill Books.
“It’s about innocent schoolgirls and hardy sailors, about the impact of war on life, and how different then was from now,” Ms Bakewell told me.
“When I was a girl I supported the war effort, we all did. But I marched against the war in Iraq. We’re less united now,” she added.
Straw proves too ‘streetwise’ for today’s students
ALL these articles by the commentariat that accuse Justice Minister Jack Straw of eroding our civil liberties are just hot air! Nonsense, really.
I have it from the man himself that all is well.
DNA? “I’d be perfectly happy to have mine taken,” Straw told skeptical students at the London School of Economics on Tuesday night. “I don’t mind if someone has my DNA or fingerprints. And I wholly refute the idea this is a government which has eroded liberty – the truth is the opposite.”
The infinitely adaptable Straw, protégé of Barbara Castle and Peter Shore, loyalist in the cabinets of both Blair and Brown, has come a long way since he was an Islington councillor in the 1970s.
A lawyer by training, he is proud of being the first Lord Chancellor in 400 years to sit in the Commons: a “street politician” as he calls himself.
Facing down the polite students who questioned the storing of DNA of everyone arrested in this country, and his veto of the Cabinet minutes relating to the invasion of Iraq, Straw may have privately pondered the lack of fire among his young audience compared to the student radicals he led as NUS president in 1969.
Something in the genes, perhaps.
Former postie delivers rebuke
LORD Clarke of Hampstead was clearly upbeat when I caught him at the House of Lords on Tuesday.
The one-time telegraph boy and postman who once tramped the streets of Hampstead, sack on his back, is proving to be a tireless advocate for the Royal Mail as the government set about its part-privatisation.
The reason for his excitement on Tuesday?
“We’ve just had a [Labour] group meeting and I had the opportunity of telling Lord Mandelson what I think to his face,” he told me.
Business Secretary Mandelson recently rounded on the Union of Communication Workers, accusing it of scare tactics. Tony Clarke was that union’s deputy general secretary for 12 years and remains a loyal supporter in the House of Lords.
All in all, Tuesday was a good day for the 77-year-old peer – he’s a lifelong Arsenal supporter, too.
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