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Apocalypse Some Other Time
In just a fortnight, Britain's PM has gone from Ming the Merciless to Flash Gordon. Commentators are claiming - almost entirely seriously, it seems - that Brown has "saved the world" with his plan for bank bailouts, now being emulated in the finance ministries of the Eurozone and soon, perhaps, in the US Treasury.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man is the cry of the day. The Guardian's Jackie Ashley writes that the problem over the summer was that no-one knew what Gordon Brown was for. After a week spent staring down the barrels of The Great Recession 2.0, we've decided (we're told) that we need Flash Gordon and his earth-saving ways.
The presenter of the Guardian's daily podcast can't contain his mirth at the prospect of Golden Gordo The Great saving not only Britain, but the Eurozone economies too.
As markets plummeted at white-knuckle rates, this summer's "Phoney Leadership Battle", in which Foreign Secretary David Miliband conspired to unseat the PM (egged on by prominent left-wing journalists) faced into irrelevance. David Cameron's Conservatives, with their talk of green revolutions, began to look like the good-times party they always were. Having your home eco-proofed is all well and good when the money is rolling in, but when it looks like you'll be fighting your neighbours over the last remaining pigeon in the street, buying groceries from Planet Organic seems a long distance away.
The very silence of the Conservatives on this most crucial of issues speaks volumes about their inexperience and their lack of preparation for the worst.
Cameron has spoken of consensus, while the Liberal Democrats argue that saving the ship should occur before blame is apportioned. We agree that drastic measures are needed, and also, as the US Treasury has noted, "this is no time for ideology" (there are no atheists in foxholes).
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However, moments of cross-party consensus are among the most dangerous moments for democracy. Moments of EU-wide consensus have extremely worrying long-term effects for democracy.
Governments are taking emergency powers; the EU's leaders have agreed to united emergency measures. We need people to ask when these powers will be returned.
We need the liberal dissenters, who argue that these bailouts signify a worrying lurch to the left, and how government intervention could do more harm than good. We need socialists to argue their corner, too. This crisis was supposed to launch the rebirth of the left. Now a technocratic-socialist solution is claimed to have averted the revolution and promised us more of the same, the people have a right to know how the hard left would have prevented a similar crunch from happening again, had their moment arrived.
Don't get us wrong: EURSOC supports measures, including massive intervention, to save the economic system from collapse. We just want to hear the other options, too, and we believe our politicians are doing us a massive disservice by not explaining them.
