Will Hutton warns on Britain:
What is going to make the years ahead doubly fraught is that the ideologies that used to provide the basis for our democratic discourse have been as torched as the economy. This is a first-order crisis to which socialism, certainly as conceived and practised over the past 100 years, is no plausible answer.
But equally, nobody can dare argue that the solution is to press ahead with yet more of the free-market capitalism that has laid Britain and the west so low. The simple-minded nostrums that have poured from the great American neocon thinktanks have been tried and found wanting. An ideological vacuum coincides with the most testing economic times for decades.
We need vision and visionaries – but what we have is journeymen espousing bankrupt world views.