Very good point. I was ctually thinking this same thing the other day. Funny how the victories in Greece and Portugal have been hardly mentioned in tthe press. Also, you forgot to mention Zapatero’s government: in Spain:-)

“Yet the parties of the left are getting none of the credit for saying: ‘We told you so.’”

C’mon. Americans last year voted in Obama as President as well as the Democrats with majorities in both Houses of Congress. The Republicans are now trying to recover lost credibility by parading Sarah Palin. Heaven preserve us.

The Socialist opposition won in Greece in the recent election but, by media reports, that probably owed much to mounting domestic concerns there about pervasive corruption on the part of the governing party.

The recent German elections are a clear case where the electorate did turn against the main “leftist” party but then Herr Steinbrueck, the Social Democrat finance minister in the last, grand coalition government, was going about last year roundly condemning the suggestion of a fiscal stimulus to boost economies out of recession as “crass Keynesianism”. Coming from the “left” that was all very curious: this was Paul Krugman’s comment at the time:

“There’s an extraordinary — and extraordinarily depressing — interview in Newsweek with Peer Steinbrueck, the Germany finance minister. The world economy is in a terrifying nosedive, visible everywhere. Yet Mr. Steinbrueck is standing firm against any extraordinary fiscal measures, and denounces Gordon Brown for his ‘crass Keynesianism.’”
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/the-economic-consequences-of-herr-steinbrueck/

It all became even more curious when the German government in fact applied an even larger fiscal boost – measured as a percentage of national GDP – than the modest fiscal stimulus announced by Alistair Darling in his Pre-Budget Report last November.

I think the SPD in Germany came to have a serious identity crisis in the perception of the German electorate, and very properly so.

It’s funny how the SPD’s bad performance in Germany is seen as the whole European story isn’t it?

People tend to see Germany, France and Italy as the big European powers… and since the Left is doing badly in all three, that’s all people know. Spain, Portugal and Greece get much littler recognition.

Purely an economic thing, though, remember. India’s ruling party still criminalises gay people, furchrissakes, it’s left-wing in economics only.

The SPD’s demise is a direct consequence of their propping up Angela Merkel for four years. Even a child could see why that would deplete any election campaign of any significance. Who do you rant against? Yourself?

Conversely, the success of Linke and the Greens indicates quite clearly that centre-left parties embracing overly-watered down centrist policies get punished and do so big time.

The case of Spain is interesting. In my opinion the Spanish Socialists (PSOE) are probably the most radical socialist/social-democratic party in Western Europe. It’s no coincidence that the radical left in Spain is at its weakest (and that’s in spite of a PR-type voting system). Simply because they have little room for manouvre.

Well Germany, France, Italy and the UK do happen to be the largest countries by quite a long way!

The article talks of Europe’s left so let’s see:
Left doing well – Norway, Portugal, Greece
Left doing badly – France, Italy, UK, Poland, Hungary, Germany (they just had their worst result in 60 years – that is bad, whatever the %ages)

So that’s 6 to 3 countries of Europe where the left is doing badly. The evidence would suggest that they are not failing, but they’re certainly not doing well. Even as a rightie though, I don’t want a failing left. Competition is crucial. One reason the UK is borrowing so heavily now is because the Conservatives were so unelectable Labour could spend what they wanted, and nobody listened when questions were asked about borrowing in a boom (the recession isn’t the reason the 40% Golden Rule was broken – recessions come and go – the fact that debt was around 40% when it should have been 20% and falling is why the Golden Rule was broken).

I am interested in where the FT got this idea that we have had ‘raw and unregulated free-market capitalism’. What is the FSA if not a regulator? If they weren’t regulating, what they hell were they doing?

“What is the FSA if not a regulator? If they weren’t regulating, what they hell were they doing?”

Partly by its own admission, the FSA was not regulating all banks effectively – see this executive summary of an internal audit of the FSA handling of Northern Rock:
http://www.fsa.gov.uk/pubs/other/exec_summary.pdf

It does not follow from regulatory failures that no regulation at all is therefore better. Nor does it follow that the FSA should be demolished as punishment, to encourage the others, so to speak.

Alan Greenspan, previously chairman of the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve Bank, diagnosed one of the problems faced by financial services regulators:

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122476545437862295.html

It is at least arguable that both the Bank of England and the Treasury under-estimated the significance of the inflating house-price bubble in Britain in the early part of the decade despite several warnings going back at least to 2002, including warnings from the IMF.

Few would argue that the Bank of England and Treasury should therefore be abolished too.

For proposals on reforming financial services regulation, try the Turner Review:
http://www.fsa.gov.uk/pubs/other/turner_review.pdf

Turner himself has said that he is neutal on whether the regulatory functions of the FSA are reformed or transferred to the Bank of England

For commentary on regulatory reform:

“One of the key messages from the [Turner] Review is the implementation of a counter-cyclical capital and disclosure regime requiring banks to accumulate capital reserves in ‘good years’ that could be drawn down in the ‘bad years’.”
http://www.kpmg.eu/SucceedingInTurbulentTimes/6649.htm

Robert Preston, BBC Business Editor on: We’ll pay for the banks to be virtuous:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/

The SDP did very badly in the recent German elections but Angela Merkel’s CDU-CSU was also down in its share of the votes cast – which is an all important factor in the German electoral system.

This concise summary in The Guardian shows what happened:

“Four years ago, the CDU-CSU took 40.8% of the vote and was forced into a centrist ‘grand’ coalition with the centre-left SPD. This time, Mrs Merkel’s vote fell badly, to 33.8%. She has only retained power because the FDP vote soared even more, from 4.7% in 2005 to 14.6% today. This was the liberals’ year.”
http://www.m.guardian.co.uk/ms/p/gmg/op/view.m?id=192484&tid=120787&cat=Comment

According to this report, it seems that the SPD made a big issue of introducing the Tobin Tax if elected to government:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4676958,00.html

But that is at best just gesture politics unless there is at the very least a strong consensus for the Tobin Tax among the G20 countries and there isn’t. In reality, if the major world financial centres – New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong – aren’t rooting for the tax, there really isn’t much prospect of the tax being introduced. So what was the point?

countries where left-wing campaigners run the risk of prison or worse, such as China

Unless they join the Communist Party. I think that you are using a highly selective definition of the term “left wing”.

@13, ad: I think his use of the term “left wing” is entirely valid if it excludes the Chinese Communist Party, one of the most capitalist and traditionalist parties out there.

9- Did they fuck. The left didn’t do badly in Germany, they had their best result ever. Were it not for the left being split between the Linke and Greens, and for people voting SPD under the delusion that they were part of the left, we could have won.

When Merkel and her libertarian scum pals fail, Die Linke will be back even stronger than before. And we’ll soon learn in this country who the people were who didn’t lie to us, in the 80s and into the world in which Thatcher’s lies have finally unravelled beyond any doubt.

[15]

Best result ever? Why does Don say in his article that the left had “their worst result since the 1950s in Germany” then?

[10] Bob B – “It does not follow from regulatory failures that no regulation at all is therefore better.”

That’s not what I said. While regulation did fail in this crisis, I do happen to think that there is a place for some regulation in banking, as there is a place for regulation in any industry that has the capability to bring the economy to its knees. The thing I disagree with is the FT’s assertion that we had “raw and unregulated” banks. They were most certainly not unregulated, and to suggest that they were demonstrates that they have not fully understood the causes of the financial crisis.

countries where left-wing campaigners run the risk of prison or worse, such as China

Unless they join the Communist Party. I think that you are using a highly selective definition of the term “left wing”.

Or maybe you are judging a book by its cover. How can you possible describe China’s ruling party as left wing? The mind boggles. They crush strikes, they use the police to evict peasants from land they’ve inhabited for generations, they have turned a communist country into something ready to join the freaking WTO.

Its almost as though you have commented on something which you know nothing about because you like the sound of your own fingers clattering on keys so much.

#16: ” . . they have not fully understood the causes of the financial crisis”

I’m not clear about who you think “they” are, not least because Gillian Tett, assistant editor at the FT, is author of a recent, highly rated book on the sources of the financial crisis:

Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe (Little, Brown 2009)

She was named: Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in March this year.

Friends tell me they have been to see a play about the crisis currently running at the National Theatre: The Power of Yes, by David Hare.

What intrigued me was that the theatre programme includes this (daunting but useful) list of suggested books to read, although I don’t think the reading is mandatory before going to see the play:
http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/51316/related-items/the-power-of-yes-our-reading-suggestions.html

But there are several omissions from that list which occur to me – notably: Martin Wolf (of the FT) on: Fixing Global Finance (Yale UP 2009).

My firm impression is that there’s an emerging global consensus that financial markets and institutions will have to be a great deal more extensively and tightly regulated to reduce the likelihood of similar crisis downstream – a clear implication of the Turner Review cited above. As I’ve posted several times on LC, no lessons were learned from the multi-billion losses made in Savings and Loans Association debacle in America in the 1980s and 1990s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis

From Stephen Roach in Wednesday’s FT:

“This crisis was, first and foremost, about the unsustainability of macro imbalances – imbalances within and between nations – as well as about the egregious flaws in policies, regulatory structures, and risk-management practices that allowed these imbalances to take the world to the brink.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9cd2e03e-b2d9-11de-b7d2-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1

13 14
The term ‘left wing’ tends to be used as a reference to a party within a capitalist economic system which advocates strong financial/economic regulation and a high degree of welfarism. They may or may not call themselves ’socialists’ but often those parties become regarded as socialist.
But socialist they are not, and the constant failure of left-wing governments to control capitalism for any length of time and to avoid the cyclical economic ups and downs of that system ( which the working-class always have to pay for) has lost them a great deal of support.
If anything, it is the right-wing parties who have gained from the failures of the left.

#19

The trouble with that analysis is the owners of banks – the (nasty) capitalist shareholders, a lot of which were and are pension funds – lost out in the financial crisis. The shareholders were being ripped off by employees of the banks.

As Alan Greenspan, previous chairman of the governors of the board of the US Federal Reserve Bank, remarked:

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122476545437862295.html

The shareholders and principal managers of the banks failed to look after the interests of the capitalist owners or the interests of the customers of banks – employee interests were allowed to prevail. That was the problem. Workers were exploiting the system.

“Lord Turner said bonuses were not a private matter for banks because of the billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money used to prop up the financial system since the collapse of Lehman Brothers a year ago. . . ”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/22/bonuses-g20-lord-turner-banks

Btw you’ve still not told us about the agenda of socialists. All you’ve told us, in a previous thread, is that the Soviet Union was state capitalism but you didn’t go on to say how that was different from “socialism”.

I could go around saying the world can be saved, but only through Milinarianism.

That tells sweet FA unless I spell out the undisclosed agenda of Milinarianism.

20 ‘nasty capitalist’ I have never said, you are quoting from someone else I think

The Soviet economic system was copied from the UK and German government whereby the state invervened to determine economic production during WW1,- the state had total control within, what was a capitalist country, hence the term state capitalism, this stage was then termed ‘war communism’, to indicate its transient nature. A small amount of googling can confirm this, I’m not in the habit of providing reading lists.
My preferred socialist economic system would be the one proferred by Gorz, – more googling for you.

#21

It is extremely difficult, verging on impossible this side of sanity, to take the economic prescriptions of the French existentialist lefties seriously. The French don’t any longer.

For example, Gorz was an associate of Jean-Paul Satre. Dig a little and you’ll find that Albert Camus split from Jean-Paul Satre because the latter was, at least at one stage, an apologist for Stalin, whom Camus (rightly) regarded as a tyrannical despot.

Lenin’s period of “War Communism”, in which markets were allowed to prevail in the Soviet Union, lasted only a few years (roughly 1918-21) before “democratic centralism” was imposed.

Trotsky correctly identified the fundamental problem with centrally planned economies:

“If a universal mind existed, of the kind that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace—a mind that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion, that could forecast the results of their inter-reactions—such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan, beginning with the number of acres of wheat down to the last button for a vest. The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal; that is why it so easily frees itself from the control of the market and of Soviet democracy.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1932/1932-sovecon.htm

After writing that, perhaps it is not surprising that Trotsky got assassinated.

Try instead Joe Stiglitz on: Whither Socialism? (MIT Press, 1996)

Some clarity about the meaning of the term left would be really useful here.

22
Are we to be judged by the company we keep?, Hayek used to be a socialist, does this mean that any comment he made about classical liberalism is considered of no value?
As far as the soviet system goes (we keep raking over the ashes of that system), most socialists know that the society in which it emerged could never remotely have accomodated a socialist economic system
My idea of insanity is the implementation of a late 20th century economic policy, which was based upon the writings of an 18th century theorist and the prevailing economic and social conditions of that time
23 There is a degree of subjectivity about what is regarded as ‘left’, it appears that it currently means various degrees of interventionism within a capitalist economic system. From other debates on LC, nazism is thought by some to be left-wing and right-wing by others.

How can you possible describe China’s ruling party as left wing? The mind boggles. They crush strikes, they use the police to evict peasants from land they’ve inhabited for generations, they have turned a communist country into something ready to join the freaking WTO.

17, presumably you would regard Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot as right-wing then, as they certainly committed the first two acts. I grant you that they favoured autarchy rather than international trade. Is economic nationalism therefore the defining characteristic of the Left?

Notice, by the way, that the Chinese economy is still in many respects more regulated by the state than is our own. They have exchange controls, for example.

“India’s ruling party still criminalises gay people, furchrissakes, it’s left-wing in economics only.”

Actually, the Indian ruling party supported the Delhi High Court’s decision to strike down the law that criminalises gay sex. It did this just after its thumping victory in face of strident oppostion from opposition parties and religious groups.

Also, good article from Sunny. Also important, is to consider the extent to which right-of-centre parties have moved towards the left, from the Tories to the CDU in Germany in response to changing political preferences.