Matthew Parris was in bracing form today:
"This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more than we were producing, and funded it precariously and temporarily by complicated credit instruments that it took a while for the market to rumble. Now a prosperity that always baffled ordinary citizens has collapsed. The collapse of confidence is not irrational; it's the correction to a long run of irrational confidence. All that stuff about the emerging Asian giants wasn't just phrasemaking for party conference speeches. It was true. We're falling behind. We face a mountain of debt: the difference between the life we are able to sustain and the life we were enjoying."
He's right. This wasn't a free market failure; it was the failure of a highly-regulated market. We are where we are because of inadequate bank governance, badly-designed regulation and profligate government, aided and abetted by all of us who have been over-stretching ourselves. Only some of that is "global". We need to keep saying this loudly and clearly, because Gordon Brown continues to claim otherwise.
Matthew Parris warns us to watch out for Labour hokum about the way out of the recession; beware of government attempts to "generate new models of high-added value industrial hi-tech innovation" for example - the market will drive any of that that will be successful, not our government. I disagree with his conclusion, that Britain is destined for "the world's second-league", but that's due to stubborness as much as anything else. He's right that we need to tighten our belts and adjust our expectations. All he leaves out is what that means for public spending.
