3-card trick capitalism

As chancellor, Mr Brown claimed credit for low official levels of unemployment and inflation, even though the causes lay elsewhere.

Inflation remained negligible because of low commodity prices and cheap imports from China, India and other Asian countries - itself the result of the government's refusal to support Britain's manufacturing sector.

And employment was sustained by a consumer-led boom, based on globally low interest rates and the specifically British phenomenon of borrowing against the escalating price of housing.

It was a boom without substance, based on credit and fated to burst like the bubble that it was.

Either the government did not know this, believing that this model was sustainable, or it lacked the ability to be honest with the electorate or to slow down the breakneck drive to collapse.

Instead, the Prime Minister, his predecessor Tony Blair, current Chancellor Alistair Darling and Business Secretary John Hutton have fawned on the parasites in City boardrooms, who have been paying themselves huge salaries and obscenely lucrative bonuses.

They have pretended that these rewards were justified by entrepreneurial risk taking, but what a joke this has turned out to be.

The cowboy capitalists in charge of Northern Rock ran it into the ground, helping themselves to the usual rewards and very acceptable severance deals, while the bank staff and customers paid the price.

And the new Labour ministers drew breath from constantly lecturing public-sector workers on the need to accept pay rises below 2 per cent, less than half the official rate of inflation, because the economy couldn't bear such extravagance, to hand over £50 billion to the new people in charge at the Rock.

Other banks are already bleating about the effects of the credit crunch and the provision for bad debts that they have to make in the wake of the subprime mortgage debacle in the US.

None of them asked to pay higher taxes when they were printing their own profits in the good old days of unregulated speculation, but, when it all turns sour, they call for government assistance.

It is known as socialising their losses and privatising their profits so that the good times are always there for big business and the rich.

For the workers, however, it is wage restraint during the boom times to hold down inflation and wage restraint in bad times because we all have to tighten our belts.

This is contempt for working people to the highest order. It is capitalism as a three-card trick.

None of the new Labour pretenders poses any real alternative to the current busted-flush Prime Minister, because they all subscribe to the same laissez-faire neoliberal economy.

The same goes for the Tory and Liberal Democrat chancers who play to the same rules.

No matter what the neoliberal zealots may claim, state involvement in the economy, including a strategic ownership stake, is vital to control the speculators' excesses and to plan to meet people's needs not fat cats' greed.