An audacious Con-Dem con

Lower working-class living standards, rising unemployment, a million youngsters on the dole, inadequate investment in industry, higher indirect taxation on the poor and even a double-dip recession are regarded as a price worth paying to secure City interests.

The Bullingdon boys boast that their agenda is shared by the OECD, World Bank and the IMF, which shouldn't surprise anyone.

International financial agencies are hooked on what they call sound finance, which translates as an obsession with keeping interest rates and deficits down as low as possible, irrespective of the effect on people's living standards.

The agencies have displayed similar unanimity in support of structural adjustment programmes as the price of borrowing by developing countries, imposing privatisation, pro-profits tax regimes and the removal of tariff walls to open domestic markets to international competition.

And when these programmes result in rising unemployment, destruction of domestic industries and mass impoverishment, the global financiers make comforting noises about short-term pain for long-term gain.

It's only when countries such as Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia reject economic orthodoxy, taking key industries into public ownership and putting popular prosperity first, that other states can see that there is another way forward.

Britain's political and City elite has united to carry through one of the most audacious confidence tricks ever by passing off a capitalist crisis triggered by the irresponsible speculation of the banks as a financial emergency caused by public-sector spending.

When banks were unable to pay their debts and were effectively bailed out by the last Labour government, then chancellor Alistair Darling set aside £1.3 trillion to rescue a sector the assets of which he could have bought at knockdown prices to set up a reliable, trustworthy public banking system.

The Tories and Liberal Democrats backed this bankers' welfare scheme and have regularly subsidised the banks ever since through quantitative easing, loaning them cash at 0.5 per cent to be lent at much higher rates, especially in the area of personal credit cards.

Politicians have a tendency to obsess over bankers' bonuses, but this is little more than populist grandstanding. The real scandal is the level of shareholder dividends, which have, essentially, been provided by public finance.

Working people are paying for a crisis that they had no part in creating while its architects have barely caught their breath before returning to the same extravagant and unjustified lifestyles as before the banking collapse.

The response by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls to this scandal is too timid by half, agreeing with the conservative coalition that workers should pay the bill but offering them longer to pay.

They should note that there is more than one way of paying off a deficit by proposing a wealth tax, higher taxation of big business and the rich and determination to end tax avoidance and evasion that costs the Exchequer £125 billion a year.

The two Eds should also point out that putting people back to work through investment in infrastructure, alternative energy sources and a major council housebuilding programme would boost government receipts.

And taking rail, electricity, gas and water back into public ownership, for a start, would trim the cost of living and enable government to intervene positively in the economy.