By Joe Higgins: from Daily Mail, February 18, 2009
For months now, arguments have raged over the cause of the catastrophic economic crisis in this State, and over who is responsible.
In the last week a senior establishment politician, a major banker and a property speculator have had their say.
‘We were all bewitched with the idea of light regulation,’ Fianna Fail Minister for Defence, Willie O’Dea, told RTE, apparently with a straight face!
‘We all got carried away on the euphoria,’ volunteered the Chief Executive of the Bank of Ireland, Brian Goggin.
‘We were all part of a mythical illusion,’ offered the busted, fugitive property developer/solicitor Michael Lynn, speaking to Michael Farrell in The Mail on Sunday.
Establishment politicians, big bankers and speculators were all central players in the creation of the burning cauldron of greed that was the property market. You will notice how their representatives, whether they had been bewitched, euphoric or deluded, were anxious to include us ‘all’ in their explanations. They were following the lead of Finance Minister Brian Lenihan. ‘This was something we all wanted,’ he declared in reference to the property bubble.
These central players are desperately anxious to implicate the rest of us in their crimes. Because that spreads the guilt, offloads much of the responsibility and means that the blame is minuscule if shared with a few million willing collaborators.
More importantly, if they can convince us that we are ‘all’ responsible then a sense of our collective guilt will make it easier to force us all into paying to sort out the mess.
They aren’t fooling the majority of the ordinary people around the country, however, who understand that they are the victims of the greed of a small minority –speculators, developers and bankers –with the connivance of the Fianna Fail/ PD parties. That is clear from The Irish Times/MRBI Opinion Poll published in the last few days which shows the utter revulsion and anger toward Fianna Fail giving that party only 22% support.
The combined 56% in the poll for Fine Gael and Labour would see these parties in a Coalition Government should there be an early election. The key question then for voters is, what these parties stand for and how they would deal with the crisis if in power.
The truth is that neither Fine Gael nor the Labour Party have spelled out in any detail exactly what policies they would implement. In reality the major reason they currently command a joint majority is that they are not Fianna Fail or the Green Party, they are not in government. They are the political beneficiaries of the disaster that has befallen the economy after twelve years of FF/PD rule.
The reality is that if there were a Fine Gael/Labour Government, its policies would not be too different from the present crew. The labour Party has long since capitulated to the dictatorship of the capitalist market and formulates its policies accordingly.
While the Labour Party Leader, Eamon Gilmore, gets praise from political correspondents for his sharp verbal attacks on Government policy, he has not enunciated any coherent alternative. The reason being that Labour does not represent a radical alternative, and certainly not a socialist alternative, which would fundamentally break with the dominance of the market.
The labour Party will become a hostage to the markets in the same way as the Green Party has utterly capitulated to right wing economic policies and endorses policy decisions that would have their leaders in paroxysms of rage only two years ago.
The labour Party would agree that the crash was caused by the actions of a small minority but subscribe to the government view that ‘everybody must play their part’ in paying the price. Hence Mr Gilmore advises public sector workers not to take industrial action to stop the savage cuts in their wages advising them, in effect, to bow quietly to a monstrous injustice.
You see we were here before with the labour Party. Many times in fact. In Coalition with Fine Gael during the 1982 to 1987 crisis, they piled cuts and stealth taxes on working people. And in Coalition with Fianna Fail in 1993 they endorsed a massive tax amnesty for multi millionaire tax cheats who had hidden their money in offshore accounts during the 1980s, while public services like Health and Education were being shredded. Labour then legitimised the same anti social greed that, less than ten years later, would manifest itself again, this time in racketeering in property.
The lesson is clear. From now to the General Election, the Labour Party must be compelled to spell out exactly what policies it would implement if in government, not give us a list of its ‘independent policies’ which are then unceremoniously ditched after the election in order to enter government with Fine Gael.
CHECK OUT OTHER RELATED ARTICLES:
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- Joe Higgins – Why I’m Standing
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- Joe Higgins: “Fianna Fail are the Party of the Vulture Capitalists”
