Money Talks: Robin Ramsay

Reaping the Whirlwind: Nigel Lawson and the ’80s Roots of the  Economic Crisis – The OT is given a tour of Britain’s political ruins by Robin Ramsay, editor and publisher of Lobster Magazine and author of The Rise of New Labour.

The Occupied Times: If you were to pick one event from recent history to help make sense of the current crisis, what would it be?

Robin Ramsay: One is hard. Here’s a couple of starting points. The budget of 1980 (the real intellectual author of which was Nigel Lawson) set the bankers free to move money and lend as much as they wanted to. It tends to be forgotten that this move happened in the UK before it did in America. In a very real sense, the present shambles is Maggie’s great legacy. Not that she had any idea of what was going on; but she was in charge, at least formally.

A second event would be the decision by those around Neil Kinnock in 1988 to give up on their anti-banker economic policy and begin kissing butt in the City; that was the moment when personal careers overrode intellect and concern about this country.

OT: These days, Nigel Lawson has been calling for a new Glass-Steagall Act, “a complete separation between classic commercial banking and investment banking.” He says the crucial “discipline of the marketplace” is being eroded by too-big-to-fail institutions…

RR: He’s an old man and has probably (and conveniently) forgotten that he’s the primary creator of the present mess. He should stick to writing about dieting. However, yes, he’s basically right in part – in his account of the problem – and wrong in his prescription that the free market can solve the problem itself. As soon as someone writes or talks about “the discipline of the market place” you are hearing ideology taking the place of thought.

OT: Back in 1999, you wrote: “The City of London has had complete control over British economic policy, and most British economic thinking, for over twenty years.” Is the City’s control as strong today?

RR: Even stronger, if anything. The events of 2008/9 demonstrated that politicians of all the British parties, with the possible exception of Vince Cable, knew nothing about economics, and were simply waiting to be told what to do by the money men. The bailout was theft, enacted by ignorant politicians who were stampeded by the bankers.

OT: Can democracy find its way back from this?

RR: Truthfully, I don’t know. Did we ever have democracy? The range of things tolerated by the powers-that-be has shrunk since 1980s, as the money-men established intellectual hegemony. I am thinking of civil liberties, basically: the right to protest and the response of the state to protests. These days, go on a demo and you might get ‘kettled’ by the police for six hours for your trouble. Even worse if you are trade unionist: months of notice and ballots before it is possible to strike. And GCHQ and the NSA are recording and analysing every form of electronic emission from baby monitors upwards.

OT: This is boom time for the surveillance industry, for the privatized demolition of privacy. What would you say to someone working in this sector?

RR: To an ordinary Joe making a living with a mortgage to pay, I would say nothing. To managers, tech innovators, I would paraphrase the bit of the Bill Hicks sketch where he asks if there is anyone in the audience who works in advertising. And when he hears a “Yes” from the audience, he says “Kill yourself. I mean it. Kill yourself.”  Seriously though, businessmen and women will always take opportunities offered them by society. Not their fault. This stuff comes from the top.

OT: Who is your political hero?

RR: In Labour Party terms, I supported the views of Bryan Gould MP, who stood against John Smith in 1992 for the leadership of the party and lost. Gould saw very clearly that the EU was rubbish, and that the City was the enemy of the British people. More recently, the Conservative David Davis is an interesting figure and might do something one day.

OT: In 2009, Bryan Gould wrote: “There have been no more enthusiastic cheerleaders for the culture of greed and excess than New Labour ministers”, in a government which “celebrated the excesses of the City”. Do you agree?

RR: Absolutely. And I would say: “no more enthusiastic and ignorant cheerleaders”. The Parliamentary Labour Party knew nothing; its leaders knew nothing. All they saw was big buildings filled with clever people making money, in the new ‘knowledge economy’. Funny how ‘knowledge economy’ has disappeared from the political discourse of today…

OT: You once described the rhetoric of the City as: “Leave everything to us; we know what we are doing. We are the success story of the British economy.” Nowadays, in Europe, we are leaving it to the technocrats, trusting the bankers to save us…

RR: It’s clear that all over Europe (i.e. EU Europe), bar the Czech Republic, the ideology of pre-WW2 classical liberalism is the prevailing view; and quite a few ex-members of Goldman Sachs have been parachuted into positions at or close to the top of EU members governments – Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy, France and Greece – to make sure there is no default on Goldman Sachs loans.

The really striking thing is that none of Europe’s left-wing terror groups – e.g. those in Spain, Ireland and Greece – have started knocking-off the bankers and Eurocrats. The cynic in me says that this may suggest that such groups were being run by their states.

OT: What does it mean to be a cynic? Is it a mode of constant questioning?

RR: Good question and very difficult to answer. I guess it’s something like this: I expect things to go wrong, and I expect it to be revealed that the motives people profess and those they really have are not the same.

OT: What’s the biggest lie Britain’s been sold?

RR: In my lifetime there have been several. Obviously WMDs in Iraq is on the list. But I would add: (a) public bad, private good; (b) the unions were to blame for the inflation of the 1970s; (c) there is no alternative (TINA) – a phrase often used by Thatcher to justify her economic liberalism. In other words, the entire edifice of Thatcherism / Blairism was built on lies.

OT: Do you think the anti-war lobby will ever recover from being so ignored over Iraq and the WMDs?

RR: The anti-war lobby is always ignored. But, as I say: you have to proceed without hope. If you need hope to continue, you are screwed. If people believed that big marches against the Iraq war were going to persuade Tony Blair to go against American foreign policy, they knew nothing about the British political system or our post-war history.

OT: The west seems intent on fighting, in Larkin’s words, “the savage wars of peace”.

RR: Giving Obama the Nobel Peace Prize was nearly as funny as giving it to Henry Kissinger. (Indeed, I have forgotten why Obama did get it). Obama was bought-and-paid-for long before his election. Anyone who didn’t know this wasn’t paying attention, or didn’t want to know.

OT: Are we humans too believing for our own good?

RR: Do we really believe? Turnout at elections keeps falling; party memberships keeps falling. We are stuck: the state is too powerful to organise against; many of us are too comfortable to be bothered doing anything; huge swathes of those under thirty are merely consumers who still think stuff is more important than anything else. The internet is rewiring our brains, diminishing our attention spans, addicting many of us.

If globalisation has failed, then we return to the nation state. Do you see anyone on the left thinking about this? I don’t. And no wonder: nation segues into nationalism, and this is the territory of the right and far right. So there’s the big necessary project: how to detoxify the notion of the nation state and make it acceptable to the left.

Robin Ramsay is the editor and publisher of Lobster Magazine.