Morning Star :: We need a socialism of faster, fairer and greener growth
Peter Hain challenges Britains neoliberal orthodoxy and outlines his vision of financial markets harnessed for the common good
In Britain, as across the world notably continental Europe the left has struggled to offer a coherent response to the banking crisis which blew like a whirlwind across the globe from 2007-8.
Despite the cataclysmic failure of neoliberalism which the global banking crisis represented, it hardly incited a resurgence of democratic socialism.
Instead, parliamentary parties of the left slipstreamed the rights incessant demand for savage cuts. But that just meant heading down the same austerity road at a slower pace, when (as Keynes showed in the 1930s) getting the economy back on the path to growth was always a surer way to sort out the public finances.
Even before the global banking crisis, governments of the parliamentary left were equally hesitant in responding to, and surviving in, the new world order that followed the end of the cold war and the development of a global economy.
In Britain, new Labour took office in 1997 on a landslide vote of hope and we delivered record rises in public spending, especially on the NHS, and recruited 800,000 extra public service workers. However we lost in 2010 on a humiliating vote of distrust, and without ever really changing the basis of the system we inherited.
That may be because of a lack of self-confidence by those preaching the socialist message. Some tacked to the neoliberal wind. Others were stuck mouthing old slogans as society moved on, around and past them.
Yet governments across the world gradually allowed the international financial system to get out of control, over a 30-year period from the Thatcher-Reagan era onwards.
It became a law unto itself, the real culprit of an obsession with keeping government at bay, making non-interventionism its watchword.
Takeovers and mergers led to banks so big that government couldnt allow them to fail.
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Morning Star :: We need a socialism of faster, fairer and greener growth