COMMENT: Capitalism fails; but where are the socialists?

AS THE capitalist economists rush to take public money from taxpayers to shore up the system from collapse, the injustice of it all is breathtaking. For years the main banks have been found guilty of over-charging customers, or mis-selling financial products, or gross incompetence. When the banks start to fail because of criminally irresponsible business plans, the government steps in with customers’ money to bail them out. Bonuses are paid, rich bankers carry on with their standard of living because we must keep the idiots lending to each other. Competition rules are torn up, denying customers choice and allowing the incompetence to go un-penalised, and the rewards for failure to continue flowing. This happens on both sides of the Atlantic – and in the middle of it too, where the Icelandic government grabbed public money to rescue a major bank after allowing the krone to weaken.

     Gordon Brown ponders what to do about it all and decides that the answer is to recall Peter Mandelson from Brussels to take over Enterprise. The justification is that he is a man who will re-assure business. Business. This is the party whose very name is “Labour”. What about a minister who will re-assure labour? Where is the bold cabinet appointment to re-assure the elected union officials who represent the workers who pay all the taxes being used to rescue the wealthy bankers? And why Mandelson, who repeatedly makes the same errors of judgement on crucial ethical matters and then blames others for his resignations? 

     Of course, the personalities are unimportant; the policies are the problem. Some US representatives had the sense to see how unfair was the $700bn ransom being charged by the White House for the return of stablility. But enough caved in when paper promises were made to sweeten the pill.  When are ordinary people – not the extraordinary thieves running our international economies and markets – going to realise they are being royally shafted by sham democracy? We need a socialist revolution. But where are the Socialists?