GEORGE MONBIOT (COLUMNIST, 'THE GUARDIAN') - 25th April 2010
Well, if you believe the polls this week, in two weeks time the Brits
will have a new resident at No. 10 Downing Street. But if Labour's
Gordon Brown does go, the Tories' David Cameron replacing him is no
longer a foregone conclusion. Until the last few days, outside of the
UK, Nick Clegg - the David Cameron-look-alike leader of the UK's third
party, the Liberal Democrats - was practically unknown. Now we're
hearing of Clegg as the shooting star in the British political
constellation, with an approval rating higher than any British
politician since - wait for it - Winston Churchill himself. 'Clegg
mania', the irrepressible British tabloids are calling it. So, with
what could turn out to be a real boil-over election on Thursday week,
Dateline thought it wouldn't go astray to take a look at Nick Clegg,
the guy being billed as "the man who's changed the face of British
politics "virtually overnight". Here he is this week, among other
things putting the boots into bankers in general and Goldman Sachs in
particular.
NICK CLEGG, LIBERAL DEMOCRATS LEADER: The allegations about
alleged fraud in Goldman Sachs are extraordinarily serious. They're a
reminder, if we needed any one, of the recklessness and greed that
disfigured the banking industry as a whole. We believe that Goldman
Sachs should now be suspended in its role as one of the advisors to the
government, until these allegations are properly looked into. But
there's a much bigger issue. Why is it that despite everything that's
happened, despite everything that's coming to light, still no
fundamental reform to the banking system has taken place? Why is it
that still the government refuses to split up the banks? Why is it that
still the Conservatives refuse to advocate the major structural changes
which we believe are necessary to make our banking systems safe so it
never again blows up in the face of the British people? For too long,
governments of both the old parties have been obsessed with protecting,
cosseting and doing special favours for one square mile of the British
economy - the City of London - rather than serving the interests of the
100,000 square miles of the country as a whole.
Now, our approach, which we want to talk to you about this morning,
starts from a very simple insight, which is this - that in exactly the
same way that politics has been captured in this country for too long
by a small clique of people from the establishment parties who have
been able to stitch up the rules together to serve their own interests,
so in a very similar but parallel fashion the banking system had become
captive to a small clique of vested interests who ran the system for
their own benefit and not for the benefit of the wider economy. It is a
scandal that despite all the rhetoric by the government about increased
lending from banks to British households and to viable British
businesses in the last year alone lending actually declined by
£41 billion. We believe that the banks that we own should be
forced to lend to viable British businesses. They shouldn't be hoarding
money - the hoarding of money, the hoarding of taxpayers' money, rather
than the lending of money to British households and to viable British
businesses is, in our view, now one of the major brakes to growth and
economic activity in Britain, and we would change it. We would say to
the banks, "You've got to lend money." We would set new targets. They
would be net targets for lending - not gross lending targets, as the
government has just introduced. And if the banks fail, the directors of
the banks would be responsible and the government, if necessary, should
sack them.
It was the Labour Party that, of course, was asleep at the wheel in the
first place. It was the Labour Party that let the bankers gorge
themselves on their bonuses, let the bankers create such huge
liabilities in the system - the liabilities of the UK banking system in
totality are now 4.5 times the size of the British economy. Gordon
Brown will tell you it somehow had something to do with the subprime
mortgage market in America. No! It was to do with the fact that the
government didn't hold the bankers to account. Gordon Brown has now
said it was a mistake - it was a mistake that the Labour government
allowed the bankers to get away with blue murder. If it was a mistake,
it was the biggest mistake in modern British history, a mistake which
cost 1.3 million people their jobs, a mistake which has cost all
taxpayers £1 trillion in the bailout of the banks. I have one
message to him - "Your sorry is not good enough when you make a mistake
on that scale." There you go. Nick Clegg, the new man-of-the-hour in
British politics. Now, take a look at this. It's a headline from this
week's 'Guardian' newspaper in the UK. As you can see, it reads: "What
links the banking crisis and the volcano?" meaning, of course, the
unpronounceable volcano in Iceland that this week caused all sorts of
strife for airlines and their disgruntled passengers. I'll read to you
again what can only be described as a pretty curious headline - "What
links the banking crisis and the volcano?" Well, to find out what he
was on about, via satellite from a noticeably busy studio in Oxford,
England, is the man who wrote the article, George Monbiot, 'The
Guardian's political and environmental commentator.
GEORGE NEGUS:
George, it is good to see you again. We definitely want to talk to you
about the link that you draw between the volcano drama, as it were, and
other things, but I can't have you there as a British commentator
without asking you about what they are calling here, 'Clegg mania'.
What the heck is going on that suddenly, out of the blue, there's this
guy that has shot from practically nowhere, in our terms, to
potentially Number 10?
GEORGE MONBIOT, COLUMNIST, 'THE GUARDIAN': Well, the world's most
boring election seems to have been turned on its head, and there really
does seem to be a possibility of a very serious upset indeed here in
the United Kingdom. My God, many of us are thinking "It's about time".
We have had this 2-party system for a very long time. It feels very
stale, very old fashioned, there's very little dividing Labour and the
Conservatives. Suddenly, Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats seems to
be steaming forward. The party which has always been in third place now
looks as if it has a genuine chance of coming at least second, and even
possibly first - according to some opinion polls. And he's got Labour
and the Conservatives really worried here.
GEORGE NEGUS: I'll bet he has. They say that a day is a long
time in
politics, it's a couple of hours in his case, isn't it? He seems to
have come from nowhere, to us as non-Brits.
GEORGE MONBIOT: Yes, and he is speaking a refreshing language - a
language that a lot of people are ready to hear and there's this sense
that these stale, old Tories, and the stale old Labour Party, who have
got us into so much of this mess we are in today, have had their day.
Nobody really wants Labour to have another term because we are sick and
tired of them and yet very few people want the Tories to replace them.
So, there's this great feeling of apathy and disillusion with politics
and suddenly people are seeing that even in our very unfair
first-past-the-post system, there might be a possibility for a third
party to have a run.
GEORGE NEGUS: A little bit of Obama about it, George?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, you know, it has been greatly exaggerated. It's
not an Obama effect really. It's not as if Nick Clegg is this
fantastic, charismatic world-striding leader figure. It is just that
the other two are so dull and hopeless.
GEORGE NEGUS: It is going to make for a very interesting
couple of
weeks that is for sure. George, we got you here really to talk about,
if you like, another kind of volcanic explosion. We have got one with
Nick Clegg, and that's the worst play on words I am going to make
tonight, you've drawn this amazing link between the volcanic
catastrophe, whatever we would like to call it, and the airlines, and
in fact, the banking crisis and the whole GFC. Now, is that the longest
bow you have ever drawn? What do you actually mean when you say that a
link can be made between the GFC, the banking crisis, and what has
happened in Iceland and the airlines this week with the volcanic
eruption?
GEORGE MONBIOT: I think what both the airlines issue, the volcanic
issue, and the banking crisis show us is that society becomes so
complex that it effectively becomes unmanageable and a small disruption
- the butterfly's wing over the Atlantic - can throw the whole thing
into meltdown. Now, this is what we saw with the banking crisis, where
the impoverished mortgage defaulters in the United States effectively
brought down, or very nearly brought down, the whole world's financial
systems. Because everything was so interlinked and so complex and so
hard to understand and there was so a little give in the system, that a
small disruption like that could create an enormous effect. Now, we saw
the same with the ash cloud that we have become so dependent on
aviation, which was previously a very small component of our economy,
and aviation is so susceptible, it's so vulnerable to disruption for a
number of reasons - partly because of climatic and physical changes,
but also because of its enormous energy demands and its very high cost.
GEORGE NEGUS: You actually said, "Over the past few days,
living under
the flight paths, people have seen the future, and they like it." Are
you suggesting that we just have to pull back?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, the party is going to end one way or another -
not least because of the prospect of peak oil, where the supplies of
liquid transport fuels are just not going to be available to the same
extent that they are today. So, we either recognise that and try to
forestall the tremendous disruption that will be caused by engineering
a soft landing, or we wait like rabbits in the headlight for the truck
to run us over. Or rather, for the truck not to be able to move down
the road at all because there is no petrol in it!
GEORGE NEGUS: A lot of your supporters on this position have
said this:
"This cloud of ash will turn out to be a genuine silver lining. Maybe
we will wake up to where our food comes from, the real price it costs
to get it here, and the vulnerability of the systems in place." Is this
a wake-up call, to use a dreadful platitude? That we should see from
this how easy it would be for things to go horribly wrong?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Yes, and I think this is a bit like Hurricane Katrina
in a way, that it's a glimpse of a possible future. Of course, the
short-term interest in politics is to say, "Well, we'll just keep the
ball rolling as far as possible and we boost economic growth and we do
all this because it's popular. We boost jobs, we boost salaries and
incomes and all the rest of it.” If what that means is that
you are on a steady ascent which suddenly crashes and collapses, then
you are going to cause far more economic destruction and human
suffering and hardship, than if you have a managed decline instead.
GEORGE NEGUS: In the last few days you have been called a few
things I
imagine like a volcano worshipper, was one that I saw, but this quote I
would like you to react to: "These crazy green, anti-humanist types,
have celebrated the volcano as scoring a long overdue victory by nature
over us horrible humans :with all our nasty civilisation and progress,
such as air travel." What I guess he is writing you off as, George, as
a doomsdayer?
GEORGE MONBIOT: It is precisely because I care about what happens to
humans that I am interested in these questions. Many people try to
create this false dichotomy between caring for the environment and
caring about humanity, but the most anti-human position you can
possibly have is not to give a stuff about the environment because
human beings are totally dependent on that environment. It is this sort
of ultra-right-wing attempt to defer and to deny the problem by trying
to cast this as some opposition between environment and humanitarian
concerns. The two concerns are one.
GEORGE NEGUS: Are you being realistic? Can you imagine people
giving up
a holiday in Greece? Can you see them going out and growing their own
veggies? Are you asking normal human beings, everyday people, to give
up these things that we call progress?
GEORGE MONBIOT: It is not a question of whether or not we are going to
give these things up, it is whether or not we are going to give these
things up voluntarily and in a managed and steady and careful and
intelligent way or whether we are going to give them up through
collapse and destruction, which is what we are talking about if we
don't anticipate peak oil, for example, let alone issues like climate
change and other forms of resource depletion. What we are looking for
now, to come back to the beginning of the discussion, is the
politicians who are bold enough to find a way out for us.
GEORGE NEGUS: George, always good to talk to you, always
challenging,
always fascinating and I hope we can talk again. Thanks for that.
GEORGE MONBIOT: Thanks very much George, my pleasure.
GEORGE NEGUS:
George Monbiot, the man from 'The Guardian', who really does makes a
habit of getting himself way outside the square. By the way, as
unbelievable as it may sound, when they're not being grounded by an ash
cloud from a volcano there are an average of around 25,000 flights over
Europe each day. 25,000. Believe me - I'm a journalist!