Where do we go from here? It's pretty clear that Gordon Brown doesn't know and that Alistair Darling and the other members of the cabinet don't either. Nor, it seems, does anyone else. It was much easier to predict that something nasty was going to happen than it is to know now when and how the nastiness will end. You had only to cast an eye over four financial indexes - current account, corporate debt, personal debt, house prices - to know that something bad was around the corner. Except that Brown, Darling and the other cabinet members didn't cast an eye over the four indexes, or if they did, decided to ignore them. They can't even excuse their ignorance of what the bankers were up to, since they chose not to know: indeed they had a political interest in not knowing, for as long as this gimcrack structure stayed upright their electoral chances weren't too bad. They could of course admit that they'd been naive, but they aren't likely to and it would be no help.

LRB 26 March 2009 | PDF Download