Coming in from the cold

Iceland held a general election yesterday. The previous goverment collapsed because its policy of encouraging reckless financial greed and speculation despite having a population the size of Wolverhampton and West Bromwich combined and a fish-based 'real' economy bankrupted them. So now, the population has elected a Social Democratic/Left-Green coalition.

How did the US react to economic meltdown? It booted out the party which encouraged, enriched and was enriched by Enron, Goldman Sachs etc. etc.

What's Britain going to do? It seems that the British population is going to elect the Conservatives, who invented all these dodges and wheezes, who openly proclaim that government is an evil imposition on the free market and on individual ambition, and who see the solution as 'cutting back' on 'wasteful government'. Now, I'm well up for scrapping ID cards and nuclear weapons, but what the Tories mean is sacking nurses, teachers, tax inspectors and all the other low-paid, unappreciated public sector workers. It won't save much at all, and will contribute to making a brutish and inefficient public sphere.

I'm not excusing Labour - they've been rightwing for 15 years now, the party hierarchy entranced by Thatcherism, never meeting a tycoon they didn't like, never meeting a lefty they did like. But still: while everybody else votes Left against the obvious depredations of capitalism, we're going to vote Right for the party which sowed the seeds of our destruction. Well done!