Tag Archives: vince cable

I watched with some discomfit Nick Clegg and Vince Cable’s Harrogate conference speeches. Discomfit because, whilst there was rhetoric a-plenty about how the economic crisis affords us an opportunity to, indeed demands that we must, build a new order from the very foundations, I can’t help feeling that our policy makers have not even got the keys to the JCBs yet.

Banker-bashing is all very well, and seemed popular at least in the conference hall. Yet just strengthening the new building with high-tensile regulations and restricting openings for excess while leaving the old foundations will miss the biggest opportunity of all: to redesign the very footings of the system behind this crisis and others before it. And it is a system which also underpins the entire divide between those we desire to help, currently eking out their living in the basement, and the fabulous wealth of the penthouses.

Our well-meant policies about redistribution and raising opportunity and aspiration will ultimately be utterly futile without understanding this; realizing that the building’s escalators are running the wrong way. Yes, we can and must assist those are unable to scramble out of the rubble themselves, but we must also level the site before we rebuild if that is to bring permanent benefits.

But unlike previous economic crises, the opportunity this time is not merely to rebuild familiar institutions, but establish an economic structure plan for a world radically different from that which applied in previous melt-downs. A truly globalized world of opportunities for real people; a whole new market paradigm in which we can move freely around the world; trade freely with people directly in other countries; reduce the power and influence of the intermediaries made necessary by the difficulties of communication and commerce in earlier centuries.