Ministry for Life on Mars
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
My name is Westmonster. I had an accident, and I woke up in 1973. Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Whatever's happened, it's like I've landed on a different planet. Now, maybe if I can work out the reason, I can get home.
In this week's episode of "Life on Mars," Westmonster watches on as a major bank is nationalised, and has to decide who is right — the people we see every day who appear to be in the 1970s, or the voices in the night, telling us this is not the 1970s.
The episode guest stars Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and the Prime Minister's Spokesman as the competing influences in Westmonster's strange predicament.
Osborne:
"The taxpayer will bear the risk of lending £100bn of mortgages in an uncertain market. We will not back nationalisation. We will not help Gordon Brown take this country back to the 1970s."
No. 10:
"All comparisons with the 1970s are absurd. The man running it has credibility in the City, it will be run on a commercial basis and at arms' length from the government."
Tune in this afternoon as Prime Minister Callaghan Brown and Chancellor Healey Darling have their say on the matter in this groundbreaking episode.
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2 Comments
Among other 1973 parallels (there was a Conservative government in 1973. They'd nationalised Rolls Royce in 1971) are the organisations in favour of this nationalisation, viz. the Economist, the FT and the finance spokesman for the Liberals who'd been for several years the chief economist of a giant multinational. Commie statists all.
Businesses need checks and balances as much as do governments. To reject government regulation of business (and who else can create and manage such regulation?) is to put forward the laughable supposition that businessmen and their enterprises, given free rein, can be relied upon to be always honest and beneficent. To call for, as right wingers typically do, the elimination of government regulation and the extreme minimization of government itself is to invite anarchy. Governments can, of course become tyranies, but the main and generally successful purpose and mission of democracy is to forestall that. In any case, unchecked governments are no more dangerous that unrestrained corporations -- the so called "invisible hand" notwithstanding. Government regulators are not necessarily those right wing boogie-men, "commie statists." These types ran the Soviet Union and were actually fascists (little different from German Nazis) posing as socialists. Fascism is a very extreme right form of government and is hardly distinguishable from very extreme left (e.g. Soviet/Mao style) government. Let's face it, more or less completely social-democratic governments have been the best overall yet seen.