As Mervyn King proclaims we're hurtling towards the biggest crisis ever, our leaders could offer more than total inertia
Last weekend, I sat under a tree in the park in the blazing hot sunshine. What was wrong with this picture? Well, not a lot, really ? until a small gust of wind brought down a strangely ominous shower of dark brown leaves, even as the mercury was hitting 29 degrees. It all suddenly felt like one of those portentous scenes at the start of apocalyptic movies, when you just know that the innocent, gambolling civilians going about their daily lives are less than one reel away from an ice ship floating up a ghostly Fifth Avenue, or an asteroid relieving the world of Los Angeles, or the worst financial crisis in living memory.
"The biggest financial crisis the world has ever faced" was in fact how Mervyn King chose to issue this week's siren wail, yet another warning giving rise to that weird formless terror that manifests itself in the form of simply muddling on as usual.
Not for everyone, of course. It is already impossible to keep calm and carry on for those who have already lost services upon which they relied. Yet even those cuts are merely licking their lips before beginning to bite in savage earnest, and we are told that those already hit have no idea of the horrors still to come. The cataclysmic event around the corner is still unseen and uncomprehended by almost everyone, and the parallels with the phoney war are inescapable.
The muddling along is understandable in those of us powerless to do anything else, suffused with a vague inchoate dread that does not preclude normal activities such as putting a wash on or wondering who'll get ditched first in The X Factor live shows. It is less appealing in any number of political leaders, who appear perfectly content to flaunt their studied inaction against a host of well-appointed international backdrops.
Keith Richards claims the Rolling Stones' manager and producer Andrew Loog Oldham once locked him and Mick Jagger in a room and refused to let them out till they'd written a song. Forgive the naivety ? especially given where the sophisticated expert approach has landed us ? but can't the powers that be agree to a global conference and refuse to release themselves until they've come up with a better solution to this crisis than inertia?
At least none of them has yet brandished a piece of paper that claims to be able to solve this thing, which is the point we'll know we're truly doomed, and the laying in of tinned goods and duct tape will begin in earnest.
Instead, we are now blessed with a daily procession of messengers who are no longer shot by their craven superiors. Time was that warning the economic times were the worst in 60 years earned Alistair Darling a monstering from his old friend Gordon's attack dogs. George Osborne was admonished for talking down the pound, and even last year Kenneth Clarke was hushed for warning that western economies were in grave danger of collapse. Today, the economists who did such a bang-up job of not predicting the meltdown three years ago are falling over themselves with arse-covering warnings. Solutions? Alas, not so much.
Thus warning of impending doom has itself become a displacement activity, a version of those inappropriate responses displayed by creatures in peril who are torn between conflicting instincts. When deciding between fight or flight, birds will often peck the ground in absent-minded search of food. The lesser spotted British politician will hold party conferences.
There may be some who find the little plotlines thrown up by these elaborately pointless events a seemly response to impending financial armageddon. I have my doubts. In fact, without wishing to go out on a limb here, I suspect that the so-called catflap between Ken Clarke and Theresa May may come to rank as the most historically ill-advised displacement activity since Nero surveyed the flames licking the Circus Maximus and opted to call for his fiddle.
Mervyn King has yet to inform us whether the crisis will drive humanity down into Earth's catacombs, where we will be forced to distil drinking water from our own urine. But we'll certainly need the odd diversion when the gathering storm breaks, so let's hope our immediate descendants will be wildly amused that so much vital debate was had over the precise weight of influence a particular cat had over some dust-gathering immigration judgment while we teetered on the brink of financial collapse. The cat in question may well become a fictional star, regarded by future novelists as an absolute gift of a way into the story of a ruling class unable to acknowledge their own sensational impotence.
It is fashionable to talk about narratives in politics, so we might observe that the narrative that has long been coalescing is that something unstoppable is in motion. A disaster was set in train ages ago, and it must play out as it will. It is as if we are living in macrocosm the story of the New York trading firm that was ruined in 2003, after an employee accidentally switched on a trading algorithm. It took them 16 seconds to go bust, but almost an hour to realise their fate.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/07/mervyn-king-financial-armageddon-inertia
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