Prior to this golden dawn of philistinism and the canonisation of estate agents, we had to limp through another four plodding years of Jim Callaghan's old style Labourism, and watch the trade unions cruise the country looking for someone to kill them off. However in the heady days of 1974, in a fug of Player's No 6 or Old Holborn roll-ups, such a future seemed unlikely. But anyone capable of a moment's reflection could have seen something apocalyptic coming. We couldn't continue subsidising our own incompetence. Some people may nostalgically yearn for those years of the closed shop and industrial unrest, when every Rover car that was exported lost the country 400 and trade union leaders stood up against the nationalised monoliths for the right to a job for life no matter how big the financial haemorrhage.
Statistics are a diversionary artillery barrage fired every time a difficult question is asked.
Words can mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean, even if they contradict what he said five minutes before. The only imperative is to have the last word. If Jean Paul Sartre were to rewrite his classic play Huis Clos , in which Hell is two other people with whom you have to spend Eternity, Alaistair Darling would surely be one of them. The world needs an intelligent new restraint to the gluttonous force of global capitalism. But today there are no obvious alternatives.