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I say ‘cack-handed’ because punishing people like Goodwin plays into the hands of those trying to pin the blame for our current economic woes on capitalist fat cats rather than spendthrift politicians. Yes, bankers bear some responsibility for the global financial crisis of 2007/08, but the reason GDP has gone into reverse again is largely due to the crisis in the eurozone and that, in turn, is the fault of Europe’s political elites, particularly the leaders of Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain. They failed to address the underlying problems of the single currency, and instead took advantage of the borrowing powers conferred upon them by monetary union to run up huge debts, thereby bankrupting their countries.
The problem with left-wing intellectuals like Will Hutton, wringing their hands with concern about the economic consequences of unregulated markets, is that they’re four years too late. The various electorates of Europe have nearly all had an opportunity to re-elect social democratic governments since 2007/08 and, without exception, they’ve chosen fiscally conservative, centre-right ones instead. It’s one of the paradoxes of contemporary politics that the market failures of four years ago led to a pan-European shift to the right, not the left.
Nevertheless, it can’t be denied that this latest assault on capitalism, which began with the ‘occupy’ movements in New York and London, is beginning to catch fire. The general view in the Newsnight green room after my tussle with Hutton was that I’m on the wrong side of this issue. ‘Still losing friends and alienating people, I see Toby,’ said Graham Stuart, the affable chairman of the Education Select Committee, who was there to talk about Michael Gove’s scaling back of vocational qualifications.
As a conservative, I feel duty bound to stick up for the City of London, and to hell with popularity. Which is why I’m disappointed that David Cameron and George Osborne have decided to appease the anti-capitalist mob rather than confront it. If they’re not going to make the case for free markets, who is? It looks as if they’re repeating the mistake made by Nicolas Sarkozy, whose attempt to align himself with the sans-culottes — by backing a financial transaction tax, for instance — has only succeeded in strengthening his socialist opponent in the forthcoming presidential election.
Perhaps I’m being too harsh on the Conservative party leadership. It may be that Cameron and Osborne are fully paid-up members of the Don’t Unseat Ed Miliband Association and are allowing him to make the political weather on this in order to save his bacon. It looks as though Labour will lose the London mayoral election, so Miliband badly needs a few ‘wins’. On the assumption that the leader of the opposition is the Conservatives’ greatest political asset, conceding this ground may be a price worth paying to keep him in the saddle until 2015.
Are Cameron and Osborne that Machiavellian? I’d like to think so, if only because it makes for a better narrative, but I doubt they’re as coldly calculating as this theory implies. Politics is an odd mixture of the cerebral and the primitive and, as a rule, the impulse to kick your enemy to death when he’s on the ground, writhing in agony, is too tempting to resist. To deliberately hold back in order to keep him alive runs counter to this powerful political instinct. So my reluctant conclusion is that the leaders of the party have inadvertently given Ed Miliband a new lease of life. Orchestrating the defenestration of Fred Goodwin is a genuine mistake, not a calculated one.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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