David Boyle's Blog, page 76

Why Richard Grayson got it wrong

I've just read through Richard Grayson's apologia for leaving the Lib Dems on the Compass website, and feel sad about it.  It hardly needs saying that I don't think he is right, but I've known Richard and enjoyed sharing a committee table with him for so long now that I can't remember when I first met him - but I think it was 1997.

I remember having a cup of tea with him for the first time when he was running the Centre for Reform, as it was then, in the wonderful Tevere cafe, since unfortunately gone the way of all cafes.  Richard was always a thinker and the party needs thinkers, and we should not be losing people like him - but there may be reasons why we inevitably will.

I've enjoyed his company during the years of Richard Grayson Mk I (It's all about Freedom) and the years of Richard Grayson Mk II (It's all about equality).

He made some points in his Compass article that made me think, but I've always known that he was a different kind of Liberal to me.  I remember running into him at the Friends Meeting House in Euston during one of the debates between Clegg and Huhne during the leadership campaign.  I was a convinced Clegg supporter, not through any disagreement with Huhne, but because he seemed to me to be searching for a new political language - which I felt we desperately needed.  I asked Richard then what he thought of Clegg and was taken aback by how much we had drifted apart politically.

I don't recognise the party disputes that he writes about from his descriptions of them, but these are just playing with words.  If I had him in front of me, I would say three things...

1  Slow progress in government, yes, but...
I recognise with what he says about the tiny progress the party has made in terms of policy implementation in government.  It has been far, far tougher than anyone might reasonably have imagined - there may be questions about whether the coalition was, in fact, the right thing to do for the party, though it clearly was for the nation (and some important things have been achieved, like taking the low-paid out of tax).

My small involvement in government since 2010 has convinced me that we are also not alone in that.  The frustration of the Conservatives is, if anything, more intense - not because they have been frustrated by the Lib Dems (though they are sometimes), but because of the sheer complexity of the system they are dealing with.  Government is intractable and almost nothing seems to be possible.

That is fascinating for me as a policy wonk, but it isn't a reason to leave the party.

2  The terrible failure of New Labour on public services.
I have felt much less sympathy for Richard's point of view because of the failure of some on his wing of the party to recognise the basic problem.

They are so wedded to the system as it was, that they never grasped the scale of the damage done by New Labour in their centralisation, control and emasculation of public services.  At huge expense, and with the aid of a battery of targets and standards and an enthusiasm for process, they rendered public services dangerously ineffective, as I described in my book The Human Element.

To say this does not make me an old-fashioned Conservative who wants to demolish services, but I do at least recognise that there is a problem in the status quo.  Austerity isn't the solution, and it isn't clear to me that the coalition has grasped the problem either to any great extent.  But I don't share the view - which Richard seems to imply - that the problem is all about defending the old settlement, and funding it adequately, because if we did that - all wouldn't be well at all.

3  The terrible failure of Lib Dem policy-making
Richard hints at this in his article, when he describes the failure of Lib Dem economic policy to provide any conviction once the party was in government.

The real problem was that, once in government, the Lib Dems found they had no distinctive economic policy and nothing much to say on public services, and without either of those they were bound to be blown around by events and by convictions stronger than their own.

That is the reason for the failure to construct a Lib Dem alternative to austerity.  It is the reason for the muddles and confusion about the various different versions of health legislation.  It all had to be made up in the heat of battle and of course it had no depth.

I was on the federal policy committee of the party during the run-up to 2010 and I must take my share of the blame for that failure, but so must Richard.

Policies with depth don't just emerge around a committee table.  They need to be based on a flurry of thinking, ideas and debate around a party leadership, and this never happened during the Kennedy leadership years.

There lies the heart of the difficulty: in practice, the Lib Dem economic policy has been an ecstasy of positioning and compromise, not because Liberals have no convictions - but because they are not terribly interested in economics.

So what really separates me from Richard here is not so much my Liberalism, but his conservatism.

He didn't want to find a new political language.  I don't want to defend the design of the 1945 welfare state.  I want an effective system that genuinely supports people to escape Beveridge's Giants, which I don't think the Spirit of '45 provided, for reasons I've discussed elsewhere.

I don't believe these issues can somehow be assumed.  They need to be debated from a radical Liberal point of view so that effective public services can survive the assault, not because we need to defend the past, but because they work for people.

But that debate never happened.  Again, I have to take my share of the blame but, then again, so does Richard.

How to shift economic power, without help from governments

One of the best of the Ealing Comedies, The Titfield Thunderbolt¸ has rather a wonderful scene at the  public inquiry where the trade union leader is flummoxed by the disparate group of volunteers who want to take over their local railway line to save it from closure.
They are non-union labour who are about to be exploited by the bosses, he says.

“But we are the bosses,” says the vicar/train-driver.

These were the days before amateurs taking over railways, at Tallylyn and then the Bluebell Line and many others. Mutualism has always been pretty incomprehensible to state socialists, and has been ever since Beatrice Webb torpedoed British mutualism on behalf of the Fabian Society.

The fate of the Co-op Bank was a bit of a blip for the politics of mutuals, but things do seem to be moving again – almost, but not quite, fast enough to make this issue absolutely centre stage for the future of the UK.

The evidence suggests now that, not only are mutuals generally speaking more successful than companies that have very hierarchical structures, but they give employees an economic stake which the rest of the economy increasingly denies them.

They are, in effect, a key part of the jigsaw that might bring about an economy that spreads the rewards equally enough to succeed – it is pretty clear now that economies which fail to do this tend to grind to a halt, because nobody but bankers can afford to operate in them.

In fact, mutual ownership of land as well as employee ownership of businesses seems to be one of the few potential solutions to the terrible mess our economic policy has landed us in, for all but the very rich.

But what is fascinating about this is that you could imagine change happening without government support, and with most governments hopelessly wedded to the old model, this might have to be the way forward.

So I was fascinated to read an op-ed article in the New York Times by the great campaigner Gar Alperovitz about how this might happen, appealing to baby-boomers who own businesses to sell them to their own employees.

If they do, it would create another 2-4m employee-owners over the next generation as the baby-boomers retire

The most interesting development in the USA is the way the steel union has now adopted mutualism, and in fact now has a partnership running with the Mondragon network of co-ops in the Basque area of Spain, which provides one model of how networks of co-ops can provide everyone with a proper economic stake.

Gar Alperovitz is something of the phenomenon, combining experience working in Congress with campaigning and academia. He is also part of the Democracy Collaborative which was behind the inspirational new co-ops built around public services in Cleveland, Ohio.

He is also a compelling speaker. I have watched him hold an audience in the palm of his hand, on a snowy Saturday evening in the town hall of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, speaking for over an hour without notes.

His basic message is that we are entering the most important period of peaceful revolution and economic reform since the American Revolution itself. I think he may be right.

The last few years of literary festivals?

Thank you to all those who made it to my session this afternoon at Ways With Words in Dartington Hall, which was magical in a whole range of ways.  The dreamy sunshine on the lawn, the otherworldly atmosphere of Dartington – heavens, I even slept in a medieval bed.  It was almost News from Nowhere in reverse.
My session on the middle classes was great fun and lively and I’m ever so grateful to everyone for coming.  I will be doing a rather different version of the middle class performance at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August.
But it was poignant as well.  I realised, sitting in the sun, that the vast majority of people who had come to the festival to listen to me, Ann Widdecombe and Roy Hattersley (a strange combination), were retired people on full final salary pensions. 
The perfect storm that is about to sweep away the middle class lifestyle for the next generation will also sweep away these final salary pensions – in fact, they have already been swept away.
The average pension pot in the UK is now £25,000, enough to pay out about £1,250 a year.  If the whole literary and cultural economy depends on pensioners having disposal income – and I believe much of it does – then it will not exist.
Those of us born between 1920 and 1950 have created that leisured, cultured world, because of generous pensions, paid for by employers, that no longer exist.  It is more than sad to see it go: it will be a disaster for the UK, dependent than much more on the largesse of Chinese and Qatari investors and the books and culture that they happen to like, and are written for them as an audience.
But then, we shouldn’t write off the middle classes quite so soon.  They have an amazing ability to adapt and survive – and it is precisely how they are going to do that which my book Broke sets out.

There is a way out.  Now we have to actually take it.

Come and get cross with me in Dartington

I'm heading off for Devon today, to Dartington and the Ways With Words Festival - and with some trepidation.

This is the first time I have dared to articulate my thesis about the middle classes in public since the publication of my book Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes? at the beginning of May.  Since then, there has been huge publicity - not all of it very polite.

My favourite among the emails I received culminated in this peroration:

"Instead you defer to your sad obsession with class, and in fact your boo-hoo story about the nouveau-pauvre middle class will leave many of your compatriots happy to see you suffer in your plight. And, in my opinion, not unjustly so.”

Quite right.  So, as you can see, I'm a little nervous of putting my head above the barricade.  And don't think for a moment that I'll be safe among the middle classes of Dartington: the middle classes are the angriest.
So come along and join the debate.  I'm speaking at 1pm tomorrow (Monday).  See you there!

Beyond the powerlessness of politicians

[image error] Steve Richards is a fascinating political columnist and he even has a one-man show, showing off his political wisdom - and particularly about the sheer powerlessness of politicians.

One of the many things I learned carrying out an independent review from the government was just how difficult it is to make anything happen.  The sheer complexity, political and administrative, of the current arrangements get in the way - the vested interests, the unpredictable side-effects of any change, and the sheer inertia of the delicate balance we have at the moment, all conspire to prevent it.

Sir Keith Joseph used to complain that he had spent his whole life trying to get his hands on the levers of government, only to find they weren't connected to anything.  And that was four decades ago or more.

I've been thinking about this for some time, especially in the light of the frustrations that Liberal Democrats have found in government, which are legion.  But I've just run across an article that has made me think differently.

Because this idea that government is some kind of machine goes very deep.  The sins of Whitehall are mainly mechanistic, and reductionist, and born of the Age of Newton.  Politics seems not even to have caught up with the Age of Einstein, let alone the Age of Chaos.  Perhaps we have become so wedded to Keith Joseph's levers that we can't see there are other ways of making things happen.

I just read an article by the highly controversial scientist Rupert Sheldrake (pictured above) about his new book The Science Delusion.

Bit of background here.  Sheldrake is the man who designed a whole series of populist experiments to test out peculiarities - is it true, for example, that dogs really know when their owners are coming home, as they so often seem to?

He sends many, but not all, scientists completely bonkers, which is why his TED talk last year was censored - though you can still watch it online.  His main sin is that he has questioned whether science is pretty much done and dusted, and whether there are actually major changes coming in the way we understand the universe.  As if that wasn't enough, he has questioned the following broad, and as he says, unproven, assumptions:

"1. Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own. Even people are machines, “lumbering robots”, in Richard Dawkins’ vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.

2. All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view. Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains.

3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).

4. The laws of Nature are fixed. They are the same today as they were at the beginning, and they will stay the same forever more.

5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.

6. All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA, and in other material structures.

7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains. When you look at a tree, the image of the tree you are seeing is not ‘out there’, where it seems to be, but inside your brain.

8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.

9. Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory.

10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

Together, these beliefs make up the philosophy or ideology of materialism, whose central assumption is that everything is essentially material or physical, even minds. This belief system became dominant within science in the late 19th century, and is now taken for granted. Many scientists are unaware that materialism is an assumption; they simply think of it as science, or the scientific view of reality, or the scientific worldview. They are not actually taught about it, or given a chance to discuss it. They absorb it by a kind of intellectual osmosis."

That is what he says.  I don't want to argue here whether Sheldrake is right in his scepticism or not.  I'm not a scientist, though I recognise the besetting sin of the English in this debate - a miserable and unthoughtful positivism, that still has our debate in its grip 70 years after it was worn out as a philosophy.  But, as a political blogger, well, I'm interested.
Because if there are radical changes in the way we understand reality, and how it is connected, then that has implications for the way we change the world - and it opens up other possibilities.  And right now, anyone who believes in the possibility of political change needs other possibilities very badly.

Why you might hug a lamp-post

The New Economics Foundation (nef) had their summer open day this week, and I had a long cool drink before speaking on the future of public services, only to discover I had swallowed something ferocious called 'Moscow Kick'.  Goodness knows what I said afterwards.

One of the old friends and colleagues I ran into there was the great Mayer Hillman, sometime scourge of the Department of Transport - the man who forced Whitehall to start counting journeys on foot as well as by car - who manages to combine being very good company with being very cross.

These days, he is mainly cross about global warming and believes catastrophic climate changes have already begun, and that all we can do for our children and grandchildren is slow it down.

This put something of a dampener on my evening.  Green think-tanks like nef are necessarily optimistic kind of places, and a dose of what may well be reality makes it tough to maintain quite the optimism one is supposed to.

As Mayer says, it is supremely ironic that mankind has been visited by an affliction that may prove to be fatal, and which can only be cured by putting aside differences and working together.

Meeting him again has made me particularly sensitive to the Re-arranging The Deckchairs phenomenon, so I was fascinated to see the news of the stand-off with police and Skanska contractors in Crystal Palace over the removal of Victorian iron lamp-posts.

It so happens that I've blogged before about this £79m PFI contract to put up lamp-posts in Croydon and Lewisham, which will mean council tax payers will be paying for this pointless exercise for the next quarter of a century.  My own lamp-posts were removed, from my street, a few weeks back.

The main justification for this huge operation, while libraries are being closed, is that the new lamps will be more energy efficient.  This is the kind of nonsense that would send Mayer Hillman almost insane with rage: the ice cap is already melting and Croydon and Lewisham are burning the carbon to achieve a sliver of a difference in energy efficiency, using the safest old technology they could find.

There might be a case for replacing the lamp-posts with new ones with solar cells, that generated their own energy - or at least pumped an equivalent amount onto the grid during the daytime that they would use at night.  But to go to this huge effort, and pay these huge sums so pointlessly to achieve so little really demonstrates to me how little local authorities have really risen to the challenge of austerity.

Or if the technology doesn't exist yet for this (it does), we should wait until it does before handing over £79m to Skanska.

It is high time we had a look at the contract.  Oh, no, I forgot.  It is commercially confidential.

The new world of artists in economics

It wasn’t actually Stout Cortes at all, was it.  It was Nunez de Balboa who stood, full of wild surmise, and stared at the Pacific.
I had one or my own moments silent upon a peak in Darien this week, at a fascinating dinner at the Whitechapel Gallery, to celebrate the launch of their exhibition The Spirit of Utopia, which opened today.
I had just been talking at a seminar in the City on the future of money, so it was absolutely obvious to everyone there – as people said – that I was not a member of the arts world.  My suit and tie, which marked me out in the City as slightly think-tanky, was obviously out of place here.  But I had been invited for exactly the same reasons that I had been in the City, because I knew about new kinds of money.
The series of mini-exhibitions under the Utopia title are thrilling in themselves, all of them in their different ways looking at aspects of economics – with the aid of pot plants, psychology consultation rooms, earthworms, and clay (people are making pots during the whole period of the exhibition).
Yes, this owes something to Ruskin – and Ruskin is, as we used to say, the grandfather of the new economics.
You could be cynical about some of this, as people are about the state of fine arts in the UK, but actually there is an energy and imagination about it that is infectious.  What I’m not completely sure about is the depth.
Because now that fine arts has discovered economics, and I gather that at one arts school, a majority of Ph.D students are starting their research by reading Hobbes and Mill, it isn’t necessarily connected either to the word of mainstream economics or my own world of alternative economics.
The exception here is Time/Bank, a very successful duo of artists called Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle,   based in New York and Berlin, whose own contribution at Whitechapel includes a brilliant film and a filing cabinet full of information and pictures about the connections between time and money.
What really fascinated me is that it isn’t that different from my own filing cabinet.  It has some files with the same titles.  Some even include the same contents.  But for this filing cabinet, you have to put on special white gloves to look at it – because it is an exhibit.
My contribution, such as it is, will be a talk I’m giving on time and money at the gallery at lunchtime on 26 July.  Do come...
But this arts/economics world is completely new to me, and it seems to me that there is an exciting opportunity.   If we could bring the two planets together – the arts/economics world and my own world of new thinking in economics – would that not create more than they are separately?

If we can provide the arts/economics world with more content and the new economics world with more imagination, maybe we can launch a Ruskin Prize to take on the Turner Prize.

Why the design of money is going to change

I promised to go on a bit about the future of money, and I've just spent a fascinating lunchtime speaking at a seminar in London organised by the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation. So now I can't stop myself.

I was talking alongside my colleague Leander Bindewald, of Community Currencies in Action, digital money guru Dave Birch and the great Australian new economics pioneer Shann Turnbull, who ought really to get a whole blog to himself. I can't say what everyone said because of the rules, but I can say what I said.  It was a prediction for money innovation.

They used to say, in financial circles, that - if governments had controlled transport - we would still have subsidised stage-coach routes.  It isn't true, of course.  But the really odd thing is about financial innovation, where we have the equivalent of stage-coaches.

The problem was that we put bankers in charge of it.  As a result, we have had a head-spinning number of innovations in financial instruments, derivatives, eurodollars and all the rest.  But the basic design of money has stayed the same since the 18th century, exactly when stage-coaches used to ply their trade.

Yes, we have had tweaks in 1945, in 1971 and in 1979, but that was all about the financial architecture of the world, not about the basic design of money.

As a result, we have deeply conservative people overseeing what is otherwise a wild and innovative system, but presiding over an antique design, ignoring the possibilities of new technology - mainly in this case mobile phones.

As a result, as well, we have had the history of the design of money airbrushed out, as if money descended from above fully formed around 1689.

We have forgotten the currencies that emerged in the Great Depression, and still exist in Switzerland.  We have deleted all memory of the 'black money' for ordinary people in the medieval period, which lost value (negative interest) to encourage spending - and seems to have financed the great gothic cathedrals.

We have censored any historical memories that might provide clues to a solution to our new dilemma - how to raise interest rates in London and Berlin without impoverishing Toxteth or Gorbals or Athens.  And how to finance small business at reasonable interest rates when the banks have lost the ability.

But I think that technology will finally corrode that conservatism - there is not an internet millionaire in California who isn't dedicated to doing so, and some will succeed.  We also have the new currencies for small-scale entrepreneurs, issued through Brazil's community banks and backed by their central bank.  We have the new currency for small business in the city of Nantes, organised by the man who is now the French prime minister.

Things are shifting.out there, and we will soon have a diversity of different currencies to choose from for different aspects of our lives - local currencies backed by local authorities, Scottish currencies and euros for use abroad, pounds to pay taxes with, and a range of rival internet currencies too.  Some will be designed for poorer people and will have disadvantages for the rich (they lose value if you try and save them); some will be designed the other way round.

Nothing can stop this innovative hurricane - but it is scary to conservative types.  That is why even Franklin Roosevelt vetoed Senator Bankhead (Tallulah's dad) when he introduced his bill for a trillion dollars worth of negative interest money issued through Congress in 1933.  That is why the Nazis and their conservative predecessors clamped down on money innovation in Europe in the mid-1930s.

It is also why the prize for bone-headed conservatism has to go to the officials of the Kenyan central bank, who have not just judged the innovative project Bangla-Pesa illegal - though it is an attempt to design a pro-poor currency along the lines of those promoted by the Brazilian central bank - but they are also prosecuting the organisers for forgery.

When 97 per cent of the money in circulation is already created by commercial banks in the form of mortgages and loans, that accusation is completely bizarre, and does no credit to Kenya.  It also gets in the way of the innovation in money design that we so badly need.

You can support them in their fight to escape jail here.

If we must create money, let's use it for something useful

It is refreshing to have a new governor of the Bank of England. It doesn't happen very often. Montagu Norman managed to hang onto the job for two whole decades between the wars.

He was one of Jung's patients (Jung famously said he was insane) and there is a strange story about how he crossed the Atlantic in disguise as a 'Mr Skinner' in 1929, for a secret meeting with American monetary officials.  The plan was supposed to have been to introduce a short monetary shock to force USA back on the gold standard. Instead it produced the Great Depression.
All of which is a way of saying that governors tend to be the most conservative of individuals, harking back to the way Things Ought to Be.
The same also seems to be true of some of the commentators.  I was struck by the normally sensible Hamish McRae in the Evening Standard talking about the dilemma about when to move back from the era of loose money (quantitative easing and so on) to the era of tight money again.  I'm sure Mark Carney will be worrying about this, but what really strikes me is how unworldly such a question is - how cut off from the realities.
Neither loose money nor tight money suits the eurozone any more.  The Germans need higher interest rates and the southern European states need lower interest rates.
Neither loose money nor tight money suits the UK any more.  London will soon need higher interest rates and Liverpool or Glasgow need lower.
In fact, there are many parts of the UK which haven't really noticed the effects of the downturn since the banking crisis not because they are too rich - but because nothing much has changed for ten years to lift them out of depression.  The banks long ago stopped lending there.
The truth is that actually single currencies don't suit anyone very well - not nations, probably not even cities, but certainly not whole continents.  More on this another day.
But for that reason at least, I'm sure quantitative easing will remain in place for some time yet, using the Bank of England's ability to create money - but then wasting it by putting it into bank reserves and, via there, bank bonuses, from where it is recycled into higher property prices.
It is a bizarre exercise in the theology of money, rendering the whole exercise pointless - bypassing the parts of the economy it needs to reach - in a tortuous process designed to pretend it isn't happening at all.

The key question for Carney seems to me whether, if we are going to create money, why we don't do something useful with it - like use it to build green infrastructure or for low interest loans for small business.  Just as Canada did in the 1940s so successfully, as it turns out.
So I very much recommend my colleague Josh Ryan-Collins' open letter to Carney pointing out the precedent.  I hope he takes some notice of it.

The next big chapter in world history (and we don’t talk about it)

I've been reading William Morris in the bath.  A satisfying venue, I can tell you.  Specifically, I've been reading his Dream of John Ball, written in 1888.

Morris dreams that he has hurtled briefly back to the Peasants Revolt and encountered the preacher who inspired it, John Ball - and spent the night with him in a darkened church, surrounded by the bodies from the first brief encounter with the enemy, talking about the future.

This is what he tells Ball about his own time:

"Yea, friend," I said, "but in those latter days all power shall be in the hands of those foul swine, and they shall be rulers of all; therefore, hearken, for I tell thee that times of plenty shall in those days be the times of famine, and all shall pray for the prices of wares to rise, so that the forestallers and regraters [monopolists] may thrive, and that some of their well-doing may overflow on to those on whom they live."

That seems to be an amazingly percipient view of our own time and the so-called Trickle Down Effect, which fails to trickle down.

Then, there was the latest Economistedition, with its cover feature about 'The march of protest' , with pictures of successive years of revolution, from 1848 to 1968 and 1989 – and then now.
I did write recently about why this might be, asking why people are so angry these days.  But I think the question is more important than that, because something strange is going on – from the peasants of North Africa to the middle classes of Latin America, this has been a slow burn revolution, but it may be gathering pace.
The Economist says it is because democracies are harder to manage.  This is a typically technocratic interpretation, and I think it begs the question.  In fact, I think Morris' explanation to John Ball is nearer the mark.
Because while Fukuyama was praising the triumph of liberal democracy, a predicting the end of history, a new tyranny was gathering pace.
I think it’s time we gave that tyranny an old-fashioned name, which the medieval scholars used to describe the similar tyranny of finance over life: usury.
I hesitate to use the word, because it makes me sound a bit mad, but it does sum up the challenging narrative of current affairs that seems to make so little impact on mainstream politics.
But we need a word to explain how the financial class has become a new kind of landlord, living off the rents and charges of the financial system which funnel wealth upwards – while real wages, and real salaries, haven’t risen in real terms since 1970, and since 1960 in the USA where the process is most established.  More on this in my new book Broke.
I’m sure the British will be the last people to rise in revolt against all this, but it is a tyranny that will affect them very much. 
My very modest semi is worth nearly half a million pounds.  If my own children are to rent or buy anything approaching it, they will have to work at a job they loathe – probably in financial services – for most of their life (another small way in which financial services is driving out the real economy).
Their dreams will be put on hold, probably forever, as they struggle to rent from the new emerging class of usurious mega-landlords.  This matters, to the middle classes here as much as the middle classes in Brazil.
So why don’t our politicians talk about it?  Partly because the conventional left is most responsible for creating it.  The most disastrous banking deregulation was enacted by Clinton in the USA, and by Blair, Brown and Balls in the UK.
The main efforts of the Labour members of the recent Commission for Banking Standards seems to have been devoted to making sure there was no criticism of the last government, without which the whole narrative becomes incoherent.
And so we wait, without talking about the most important issue of the age, while the global revolt – against a governing class which is too close to the systems of tyranny – very slowly gathers pace.