Weak and feeble pleas

With monotonous regularity, we are told of a "global downturn," a worldwide "credit crunch" or a "slowdown in the world economy."

These beastly and evil things, these monsters from the dark night of a speculator's worst nightmares, are talked about as if they are totally depersonalised phenomena, happening without anybody's conscious volition, just appearing as if by magic to present hapless politicians and bankers with problems that must be resolved if the world is to continue into the bright and endless day of capitalism's Shangri-la.

However, on the other hand, minor issues, such as the relatively tiny degree of benefit fraud or the small number of overstaying foreigners in the country, are presented as sins committed by evil and malicious men and women who have ice in their souls and great harm to the country and the world in their hearts.

One wonders if the Browns and the Darlings of the world seriously expect to get away with this mumbo-jumbo, if they really think that the population at large is as gullible as they seem to believe.

By implication, if not in so many words, the message being delivered by new Labour and their international allies is that US subprime mortgagees have driven the world's economic system to the verge of collapse and, by irresponsibly taking on mortgages that they eventually couldn't afford, have behaved in a manner that verges on criminality.

The fact that the decisions were not theirs, but were forced on them by a system which, with the massive availability of credit, drove up housing prices across their country and, with the US government having no interest in providing low-cost social housing, gave them no alternative but to go deeply into debt in order simply to have a roof over their heads.

The decisions were taken by speculating banks and other institutions. They drove up the prices. They jacked up interest rates and made mortgages unaffordable.

They recklessly traded subprime debt between themselves, hoping to get a slice of the action that had proved so profitable to others.

And they ran out of trust in each other and are now jacking up the price of credit between themselves, in the hope of recouping the individual losses that they have incurred with their profligacy.

But where are laws, which new Labour finds so easy to churn out against the poor and disenfranchised, being directed against the speculators who refuse to pass on interest rate cuts to their customers? Not a sign of them.

Rather, messrs Darling and Brown implore them to cut their rates, beg them to consider the needs of the rest of the population - and gain precious little success with their pleas.

If anything tells you just whose side this government is on, it is the lack of authority that it displays with the exploiters of the free market coupled with the authoritarian bullying that it exerts on the poor and the needy.

What is needed is not more self-regulation by banks and building societies, but a massive exercise in publicly owned housebuilding and national control of the financial institutions that are milking the market for all that they can get. It is not pleas and supplications, but orders and laws, that will finally take their greedy hands out of our pockets. But it is unlikely to be Brown and Darling who find the courage to eventually make them.