Nationalisation

The idea of social ownership, according to today's (Conservative-leaning) Sunday Telegraph, is no longer a 'dirty word'. I'm glad. When I co-founded the Campaign for Public Ownership, we thought that we could maybe shift debate some small way. I certainly did so in the knowledge that nationalisation wasn't necessarily either something associated with the twentieth century or with socialism. However, the silver lining of the present crisis seems to grow by the day.

Panics and crashes happen all the time. The media should put down the 1929 example and perhaps have a look at the panic of 1819; a financial panic which ended up formally excluding slavery from half the territory of the United States, breaking up an old consensus, and unfreezing a conservative order in politics that had subsisted since the end of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

We face the very real prospect of politicians being forced to confront the fact that deficits and debt unbacked by anything mean retrenchment. That means far less money for consultants and outsourced government. Railway companies, living high from a natural public monopoly, are going to come under pressure when their subsidies are withdrawn and the state might have the chance to inherit new trains and service improvements at the expense of bankrupt companies.

Bae systems are going to have to cede to American companies in the Pentagon feeding pool, which is going to mean that Britain can recover military sovereignty in procurement. People are going to stop confusing the natural, neutral idea of a market with a sort of rapacious capitalism run by former Maoists and Trotskyites who worship at a cult of hollow progress.

So, we're back on the high road to a mixed economy, with Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany in increasing step. If you think that tomorrow's likely worldwide suspension of banks will simply prove me wrong, or that oil falling is a sign of our incipient disaster, think beyond. This blog was gloomy before it was fashionable, but I wanted in a small way to alert people. Now, I want to point out what may go right. Here are ten things;

1)Twenty years of lower oil prices before the trend resumes. That's Ahmedinajad out in the next Iranian elections and his treasury less full. Since Iran, along with Saudi Arabia, sponsors most of the terrorism, Islamism and badness in the world, that outcome is a very good result. That's also twenty years to reopen mines, develop clean coal technology, and to build new nuclear technologies and viable renewable energy to feed the world.

2) A forced return to a world where credit is tied to land or earnings made in the creation of benefits in the real world, and where governments cannot feed mad markets operating with products that defy reason at such speeds that no one understands them

3) A pressure to resolve wars, to cooperate, and to obey law, not to start fights and break the law for unilateral reasons

4) A temporary rise in crime that will make the case for more local prisons and custodial sentences and for rebuilding social discipline.

5) The end of the academic and pseudo-intellectual cults of progress, narcissism, relativism and identity which has dominated what passes for the life of the mind and either gilded greed or offered no alternative for forty years. Here are some links to one guild socialist who spoke out against this; here are some links to another great mind.

6) The end of a deep flirtation in the United States and elsewhere--though I leave Italy aside from this--with a sort of modern, stupid, paranoid and greedy fascism disguised as nationalism. Even if Obama-Biden don't win the landslide they'd get if the election were held today, the sources and credibility of this sort of thing is drying up.

7) An African continent from whom, thanks to Gordon Brown (primarily) debt was lifted by the millennium debt initiative just as China and India started to use Africa's commodities. For the first time in over two centuries, Africa as a whole will be the last hit by a Euro-American crisis. Indeed, West Africa may be forced to rethink a dangerous single currency scheme just as South Africa, Zambia and Kenya develop an African way of avoiding dependence. It isn't that they are being colonised by China; China is slowing down, and they've had money and investment out of them before the slump.

8) This is a personal note. I admire Gordon Brown. I dislike some of the anticatholic bigots and sectarians in his party very much, and I resent the way that vapid fops are foisted by the media-political class on what was the working person's party. Brown has played what the British call a 'blinder' in the present crisis, and I would be pleased to see him personally vindicated by his actions as the house falls around him, though my resentment at the people who took over my former party is still strong. If the crisis reinvigorates sensible unions, sidelines faux-radicals, and puts Labour back as the party of the mixed economy, the working person, and all the people in the country, not just some atheistic bunch of maoists and former trots, I will be happy.

9) I hope that the present crisis more or less puts paid to the idea of endless wars for freedom which have as an incidental consequence the destruction of lives and freedom. Modern warfare costs huge amounts of money, requires a defined enemy, and is usually perpetrated without a draft and with the collusion of large economic interests in the energy and military industries. These things, if one squints a little, may be seen to be changing.

10) Finally, people might just stop loading their heads with i-pods, their days with isolated toil, their relationships with terms borrowed from the property markets and their lives with debt and false ideas of rights. Indeed, the fact that charities which became part of an industry of harassment and of the expansion of the ideology of rights at the expense of their core message are in as much financial trouble as the most self-righteous branches of local government is quite an achievement.


So things aren't that bad. I didn't note that the bottom is now clearly out of the nonsense global warming idea, nor that societies disrupted by the immigration of globalised groups who were brought in to undermine local wages now have a breathing space. These two are good things. Deo Gratias. Folly is meeting its reward. We face pain, we face sadness, and we face trauma in people's lives. But there is hope in this fall, and if played right, we might have a better world after it.