Henry Porter et la récession

[Taranne]

Riot? If I were 20 years younger I would take to the streets

* Henry Porter

The riots in Paris and the demonstrations against foreign work forces being used at British oil refineries and a power station seemed to be a presentiment of widespread civil disturbance, especially in this country. We are, after all, only at the beginning of a slump which is predicted by the IMF to hit Britain more seriously than any other developed nation. It will be longer and deeper and we can already see the hardship, the bills accumulating.

In the last week, it seems that I have hardly had a conversation that has not dwelled on the economic crisis and how we arrived at a position where we are paying to bail out the bankers, who are still claiming vast bonuses, and face finding another £20bn each year in taxes or losing that amount in services.

If it had been a matter of straight theft - ie the damage done was equal to every bonus - the world economy could easily absorb the hit, but there is a vast multiple involved between the amount taken in bonuses and the bail-out received from governments. Figures to be published in Vanity Fair next week show that the bail-out in the US is anything up to 900 times the bonuses paid to the top five executives of leading American banks. At Citicorp, bonuses equalled $54m in 2007 while the bail-out was $45bn. This ratio doesn't capture anything like the economic consequences of greed on both sides of the Atlantic. They are incalculable. The crime is nearly the equivalent to poisoning of the world's water supply. If the banking industry and advocates of unregulated market capitalism expect a return to normal service after the slump they are gravely mistaken.

It is fortunate for the hedge fund managers and derivative traders in Britain that the London mob does not materialise at moments like this to drag them from their spruced-up homes and limousines as regularly happened in the 18th century. In one way, it is also regrettable, because then the mob, which, incidentally, is a shortening of mobile vulgus, affected the conduct of politics and on several occasions changed things for the better.

It was not made up of the depraved and violent underclass found in most historical accounts, but of groups of young working men and apprentices who, while demonstrating for Protestantism and against foreign workers, also played their part in supporting liberty.

Something of their voice was heard last week outside the refineries where foreign workers have been employed en masse instead of British workers, but in London, everything is - for the moment - quiet. We are slower to anger than the French, although I must say that if I were a member of my children's generation I would very much feel like hurling the odd carton of milk at politicians and bankers of the older generation.

For the people who are going to pay for the lunatic exuberance of the last decade are not its perpetrators - largely the baby boomers born between 1945 and 1965 - but those born after 1985 and, by the way, several succeeding generations. To put it crudely, my generation has stolen from its children and grandchildren. It is they who will be affected by £20bn per annum shaved off services and for as long as anyone can predict.

And this crisis means that we are about to fail in that other important obligation of providing jobs for people coming out of university and school. Last Friday, it was reported that unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds has risen to 16.1%, which is above the European average of 15.9%. That figure is bound to grow over the next two years.

Look coldly at my generation, the one that's has been claiming every sort of entitlement since the Who sang about it, and you realise that we have been criminally irresponsible. We are leaving the people born after 1985 not just with the bills for this economic mess, but we also expect them to pay for an increase in the cost of state pensions for us, a rise of benefits and soaring pensioner health costs, which has been clear in demographic studies for some time. How young people are going to get started in paying for our old age without jobs and with a credit crunch and a frozen property market is anyone's guess.

Consider the political classes of today, the people who clustered round Tony Blair - born a month after me in 1953 - and who have been in charge for more than a decade. What have they done to make politics and the business of Parliament responsive to the widely appreciated needs of this century?

Though there are many well-intentioned politicians, politics probably hasn't been held in such low esteem since the time of the London mob. It simply fails to deliver. Even in the good years, the government spent vast amounts on education and health, but failed to secure a proportionate rise in standards and productivity.

I won't try your patience with my generation's failure on rights and liberty, its casual erosion of the privileges that were passed to us by our parents, or its bewildering ignorance of history, but it is important to understand that at the heart of the deterioration is Parliament and in this sense politics, rather than society, is broken.

Last week, a friend said that what he found so frustrating in the scandal involving peers allegedly offering to influence laws for cash, as well as the apparent immunity of bankers, was the absence of justice. None of the 3,000 offences introduced by Labour apparently caters for lords and multi-millionaires. But this is minor compared with the crisis in the way laws - often designed to serve the political classes of my generation - are drafted and passed without proper scrutiny.

My generation wanted everything - good food, cheap travel, large disposable incomes, luxury and security - and we have had them all, but at a great cost. We knew about climate change a long time ago, yet our government all but ignored it until the Tories made the running. We knew that bankers had not discovered the secret of limitless wealth creation, but we failed to regulate. And now if my children's generation demonstrates, we will deploy a newly equipped and trained riot police to protect us. You see we have been expecting trouble.