The market can be broken like the unions

Not so long ago, there was a widespread fear the unions had acquired a leverage over the state and were using it to gain gross sectional advantage.

Equally widespread was the creeping sense that no government was in a position to do anything about it. Somehow or other the trade unions had become a law unto themselves, credited with dark powers quite beyond human contrivance or control.

Today one senses that there is a comparably fatalistic fear that those who operate the global market have gained an equally self-serving and irresistible leverage over the state which no political party dares to challenge, the market having acquired a semi-divine status.

In the case of the unions, of course, Mrs Thatcher eventually broke the spell. All that was needed was courage and determination. The mystery was that it had taken

so long for the penny to drop.

Something comparable can and should be done soon about global capitalism. Today's economic bad times are not an aberration; they are an entirely integral part of the system, as are its myriad victims.

What must be grasped, as the historian Tony Judt has noted, "is that men and women in precarious employment, immigrants with partial civil rights, young people with no... job prospects, the growing ranks of the homeless and the inadequately housed, are not some fringe problem to be addressed and resolved, but present something grimly fundamental".

In other words the national State's impotence is no longer an option; whichever party dares to come up first with a blasphemously interventionist protection narrative will hold the key to the future.