This week’s Times/Populus opinion poll suggested that the meltdown boost for Gordon Brown’s personal rating has faded. But there is rather more to these latest data than simply a restoration of the Conservatives’ double-digit lead.

An interesting syndrome has come to light, and I am dubbing it ‘this depression is going to be very bad for Britain – but I’ll survive’. There is now what the researchers call a gap between personal optimism and public pessimism.

What can this mean?

It could mean any number of things: far too many people still just carrying on carrying on. Figures from elsewhere showing those …

The problems – however astonishing and severe – are symptoms of the financial sector alone.”
Financial Times leader, 28.12.08

At the moment I would hazard a guess that we are about one-fifth of the way through the current crisis of Zeitgeist. I read last week, on one of the more respectable financial websites, that, with so many companies financially weak, 2009 would see ‘a bonanza for mergers and acquisitions’. For the nth time, a member of the Cabinet parroted that “global problems require global solutions”. Two UK banks seemed unwilling to take the hit for £32 billion worth of losses in 2008: Alistair Darling thought they should absorb them from ample existing capitalisation, but the bankers failed to see why they couldn’t have more taxpayers’ money instead.

The day before, I listened to six property experts on BBC Radio 4 debating how to get the housing market moving again by loosening credit. Later on BBC News I heard Gordon Brown reaffirming his desire that nobody should be repossessed as a result of “overstretched” borrowing.

Everything you’ve read in inverted commas so far in this Opinion piece is about as wrong as wrong could be.

Our problems did not emanate from some oddly No-mates organic thing called ‘the financial sector alone’. They came from bankers forcing debt onto people who had in turn decided to suspend disbelief. And they, in turn, are the products of a dumbed-down Western culture fixated by material well-being, targets, the Office, bling and GDP.

But, apart from the more gullible suckers, long before there was any sub-prime debt (surely the euphemism of the Millennium) most articulate western consumers had accepted that dealing with any commercial manufacturing or service-providing concern of any size involves ignoring all the lies, noting the lack of ethics, and being prepared to threaten in order to get even minimal satisfaction or after-sales service.

Enormous global combines without a clear culture have exacerbated the problem by basing their business models solely on production output and the whims of remote shareholders. In that context, ethics are for wimps – and if the only answer to large-scale failure is yet more M&A activity to satiate even greedier shareholders, then I have news for us all: it can only make things worse. The bigger an organisation gets, the more remote the customer becomes.

Global problems most emphatically do not require global solutions: we’ve tried that to the current tune of $8.5 trillion, and it’s made no impact at all. What we need is to question the whole validity of globalism in an environmentally threatened world, and reject the Friedman/Levitt drivel that started all this nonsense in the first place.

We do not need to bail out any more bankers: we need to remain calm and tell the banks ‘no more bailouts until you start lending to sound young businesses’.

For all its ludicrous ‘New’ prefix, Labour remains a corporatist political Party: a believer in Big and On Message and hubris-fuelled promises that quickly become a hostage to fortune. It likes One Size Fits all and universal largesse – both of which reflect the movement’s fundamental inability since 1997 to recognise the difference between the deserving and the desultory. It is this lack of discernment which lies at the heart of its abject failure to deal with the current fiscal, economic and human crisis.

The Party which belatedly dumped Clause Four clings still to the principle of No Means Testing. In …

As the Green-gate affair rumbles along in the background, it is hard for those of us who remember early 1970s America to ignore the parallel: an increasingly controlling Executive, fears for personal liberty – and a man at the top with serious personality dysfunction.

Richard Nixon and Gordon Brown do share striking similarities of circumstance and character.

They had puritanical backgrounds with domineering fathers, were intellectual prodigies, intensely private – and awkward in company and public. Both gave the impression of being somehow ‘not quite right’. The 1960 anti-Nixon slogan ‘Would you buy a used car from this Man?’ seemed to fit immediately; and I’ve also now lost count of the number of women who find Brown ‘odd’.

Both were manipulative in their cultivation of ‘poor me’: Nixon the small-town farmboy who ‘never had it easy like the Kennedys’, and Brown the young man agonising about potentially lost sight (a fact the politician kept to himself until he needed a sympathetic leadership image). Dicky wrote about ‘Five Crises’, and Gordon continues to insist he is the best man in crises. Nixon had his Kennedy to envy, and Brown has his Blair to hate: ‘it came naturally to them, but I’ve had to work at it’ is also a shared view – displaying an obvious desire to be seen as noble and heroic.

Fellow sufferers from indecisive depression, they instinctively disappeared from the stage when blame was being assigned. They expected people to accept ridiculous explanations of dubious behaviour, and had associates who insisted they were very nice really – but swore obscenely at aides (or screamed at secretaries) in private.

The observations may perhaps be harsh, but there is something abnormally untrustworthy in the dissembling, shifty nature of these men – an ethical doubt borne out in both cases by shadows and clouds after every episode – and strangely locked cupboards where nobody may go.

I first decided I was a Liberal at the age of eleven in 1959, when I saw Jo Grimond explaining why worker-shareholders in British business would get us out of the Union strike turmoil. He seemed to be the only bloke in Parliament suggesting this excellent idea, and although the Liberals had just eight seats at the time, my instincts were drawn to the obvious sense of it.

The main thing it did, of course, was to continue the tradition set by Grimond of creative policy in the face of a changing society. In 2008, Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats face exactly the same challenge. But there is a mainstream way to rise above ‘meltdown noise’ that is Liberal in both its common sense and moral tradition.