Another roll of the dice

If we were to throw a die to forecast our future we might, like Luke Rheinhart’s Dice Man, load the odds so that one face predicts rapid recovery, four faces offer progressively increasing degrees of gloom ranging from a one-year recession to four-year deflation, and the sixth face suggests something very more radically threatening.

It is probably not too pessimistic to suggest that within a year or so the sixth face of the economic die will give us a scenario in which our bankrupt liberal democratic (and as it happens, capitalist) nation states will have no choice but to accept bail-outs from countries whose politics we abhor.

In this scenario our economic survival becomes dependent on Saudi Arabia, China or Russia and its old ’Stans. None of these are remotely liberal or democratic by our standards, nor are they strictly capitalist in our terms, in the sense of a diversified, decentralised economy.

Will this dependency come without demands? I suspect not.

For decades "our" IMF has bailed out third world countries only so long as they promise to adopt developed world capitalist economic management principles. I think we can be reasonably certain that financial support from the purveyors of sovereign wealth such as China will carry similar or more stringent obligations.

What is therefore at risk is not just our economic viability but the very freedom we have fought for over centuries to run our societies as we wish.

The supposed destructive threat of Al Qaeda will have materialised, but it will have been delivered not from Islam but by the free market capitalist fundamentalists that have infested our economy, out-manoeuvred our regulators and seduced their political masters.

The axis of evil will have triumphed but that axis will emerge to be not the barbarian at the gate but the enemy within.