As with Karl Marx, Hobsbawm is insightful into the inherently unstable nature of laissez faire doctrinnaire capitalism, if not on Communist politics.
The 20th century is well behind us, but we have not yet learned to live in the 21st, or at least to think in a way that fits it....There is also a specific swipe at New Labour,
We have lived through two practical attempts to realise these in their pure form: the centrally state-planned economies of the Soviet type and the totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy.
The first broke down in the 1980s, and the European communist political systems with it.
The second is breaking down before our eyes in the greatest crisis of global capitalism since the 1930s. In some ways it is a greater crisis than in the 1930s, because the globalisation of the economy was not then as far advanced as it is today.
Under the impact of what it saw as the Thatcherite economic revival, New Labour since 1997 swallowed the ideology, or rather the theology, of global free-market fundamentalism whole. Britain deregulated its markets, sold its industries to the highest bidder, stopped making things to export (unlike Germany, France and Switzerland) and put its money on becoming the global centre of financial services and therefore a paradise for zillionaire money-launderers. That is why the impact of the world crisis on the pound and the British economy today is likely to be more catastrophic than on any other major western economy - and full recovery may well be harder.In fact, the IMF have forecast that the global slump will affect Britain four times harder than any other economy in the developed world.
The obvious fact about the impact of the slump is that it was always bound to end up like this and many wise commentators predicted it was virtually inevitable.
John Gray wrote in the New Statesman just before the 2005 election ,
the denial of awkward facts is pervasive in British life, and is shown in the failure to address rising levels of debt. One of the paradoxes of Labour's embrace of neo-Thatcherite orthodoxy on the virtues of old-fashioned public finance is that it has gone hand in hand with the encouragement of a post-modern culture of reckless private borrowing.That's why Hobsbawm is entirely right to refer to the 'theology' of 'market fundamentalism'. New Labour's private debt fuelled consumerism was as deluded as the 'Real Socialism' of Eastern Europe in the 1970s.
A considerable part of the general prosperity of the Blair era has been fuelled by credit-card debt and home-equity release, and a "live today, pay tomorrow" mentality has become deeply ingrained. For many people - including students paying their way through university - debt has become a necessity, but for many others it has become the means whereby a standard of living that cannot be justified in terms of earnings is kept going on the never-never.
This carpe diem philosophy has been reinforced by the collapse of pensions. Old-style final-salary schemes are dying out in the private sector, and - though the government fell silent on its plans to scale them back in the run-up to the election - they are under attack in the public sector as well. In these circumstances, planning for the future is a profitless exercise.
Many people have decided simply not to bother about saving; they go on spending money they do not have, in the belief that ever-rising house prices or a resumption of inflation will bail them out of debts they cannot repay. For a large part of the population, avoiding thinking about the future is an integral part of their present quality of life.
Many like the intelligent conservative John Gray refer to New Labour's 'Market Bolshevism' or 'Market Leninism': a rigged market imposed on every sphere of human life, the creation of a new economic man whose physiological and psychological needs can be manipulated by the state and advertising and PR.
It's this neoliberal model economy and democracy that Britain has been so aggressive in advocating to other 'New Democracies' from Poland to Ukraine and, most contemptibly, to Georgia, a mafia style clan elite system rebranded as a thrusting liberal democracy.
In many ways, Britain under New Labour has been a feeble old body politic artificially hooked up to a life support machine through the injection of capital, migrants, indeed of life from elsewhere whilst its internal organs have started to pack up.
The cosmetic changes after 1997 did nothing to reform what had been going wrong with Britain: relying on London as the dynamo sucking international capital and injecting it back out across the rest of a lame deindustrialised candyfloss economy and listless acres of legoland.
Britain has been living in a Peter Pan never-never land for over a decade, something seen in the infantilism of its consumer culture, the dumbing down of politics to soundbites, the feelgood factor and a world of shallow media and celebrity.
The way in which Britain has deluded itself that even if it is not an economic and political powerhouse of the global economy it can be a Global Player, with Lilliputan figures like Miliband 'positively' demanding NATO expansion into Eastern Europe in the face of Big Bully Russia.
Where New Labour commissars, Liberal mandarins and the British Council have desperately sought to emphasise that Britain's "cultural power" makes it fit to strut about on the World Stage and pontificate about how great it is and why the world should buy into its stupid universe of pop royalty dreck and BBC costume dramas.
The harder the crash, the better it might be for Britain. It might finally wake up to the reality of its shrunken economy, decaying political system, and overextended strategical posture and try to live within its means, as well as to just stop pontificating about the superiority of its supposedly higher 'values'.
The problem is that populist politicians are never prepared to follow Orwell's injunction that 'liberty, if it means anything, is telling people what they do not want to hear'.
One of the most annoying parts of the fallout from the economic slump in Britain and the expenses scandal amongst MPs is the idea that the British people have been 'betrayed'. As if British people had been forced to go into debt and consume greedily.
With the exception of students forced to take out loans, British people were only too happy to take out loans until the banking crisis and collapse in house prices meant the unsustainable and fake bubble economy lost it's snap.
But for has-been politicians before the era of New Labour, it's a great opportunity to pretend otherwise, as Bryan Gould an ex-Labour Grandee in the 1980s who opined in the Guardian,
,Ever since democracy was ushered in, there has been no shortage of powerful forces dedicated to undermining it. This is for the obvious reason that the whole point of democracy is to offset the power of the powerful with the political strength of the people.
A more cynical view is that the powerful use the political strength of 'the people' to offset the power of rival power groups by claiming exclusively to represent the people by knowing them as if they had created their opinions for them, a conceit held by radicals from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks.
Yet it was also at the heart of the New Labour project, the arrogance behind which was the conceit that Gould perpetuates here by assuming that only Labour could really represent the people against the powerful, despite the fact that most in Labour were and are from Britain's ruling elite.
In practice, that elite has consisted of trade union barons, Shirley Williams, Lord Kinnock and all those who have wrecked Britain since the 1960s with their smug complacent belief in Britain's world historical position and importance, frittering money away on nuclear bombs and 'defence'.
Bryan Gould peddles such illusions no less than New Labour, using political language of the sort Orwell warned against e.g,
...the major source of progressive ideas, that it has provided the most reliable stimulus of new thinking, that it has generated the most creative dynamic for reform
The largest illusion is that New Labour 'sold out' the British people. It did not. It tappped in to the lazy desire of large numbers of British people for easy wealth and consumer status, the 'feelgood factor' and a bovine belief that 'we;re basically the best' nation on earth despite everything.
Smug notions of 'fairness', 'basic decency' and other self sustaining myths and upbeat boosterism flattered enough people that their private debt fuelled bubble economy matched their 'cultural vitality' from Cool Britannia to having the best humour in the world etc etc.
The key progressive jargon was 'post modern' and 'ironic' with rationalisations in the form of soundbites pouring from progressive texts 'a nation fundamentally more at ease with its diversity', 'dynamic', a 'creative hub of global creativity' etc.
Britain was in trouble in 1997 and its even more up the spout now and a large number of Britons deserve their debt problems because they were stupid enough to buy into the cretinous vision of New Labour and the idea that they could have everything they wanted though easy cash.
New Labour did not betray 'the people'. British people betrayed and deluded themselves, giving truth to De Tocquville's maxim that people often get the governments they deserve.
Enough of the 'people' gave away their power by colluding in becoming consumers instead of citizens, meandering through their own collective brain death through tacky talent shows, showbiz values, reality TV and soap opera consciousness.
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