Invisible Handjobs.

Mirrors without Economics.

The chorus of "I told you so!" cannot fall on enough ears right now, not just in Whitehall but in the rest of the country. As the ears of the charlatans behind this doomed experiment - they call austerity - are notably deaf, only from below can the opposition emerge to this vandalism. It's only austerity for the people who rely on the NHS, state-schools and a benefits system to fall back should they lose their jobs. There was just word of a double-dip recession when the oik first set about on his 'slash and burn' approach to the economy. Since then we've seen growth dip, flat-line and then dip further, it doesn't seem as though the artful oik knows what he's doing. Or perhaps this is part of a fiendish plan. It remains to be seen, but what we know is that this man lacks any formal education in economics (that's not unsual) and he's surrounded by a coterie of advisers who are devoid of theory. He's far too comfortable taking risks which he won't have to suffer for and ordinary people will - the so-called 'difficult decisions'.

The message was posted and it was received with the Conservatives getting smashed at the local elections. It didn't seem to remind them they never had a mandate to begin with, they only succeeded in raising their vote by 3% against one of the most unpopular periods for the Labour Party. That says a lot that the political class don't want to hear. The last Conservative leader to win 40% of the vote was John Major and Thatcher was never as popular as the Party itself. All that really mattered to the Party was to keep hold of the London City-State, if that was lost then the whole thing could be lost. It was also a key opportunity to snuff out any sign that Galloway's victory in Bradford would have impact outside of Yorkshire. And yet the Tories entertained the delusion that Boris won because he embodies a solidly conservative set of virtues. The gap between Ken and Boris now closer than ever at 3% rather than the 6% gap in 2008. There was some truth to Ken's suggestion that he was just "hated more" than Boris.

In the midst of this the BBC seem incapable of acknowledging that the ongoing attempts to reduce the deficit will shrink the economy. They can't even articulate that the cuts to the amount of money flowing into the economy will not boost demand and growth. We're just told that the cuts to the salaries and pensions of public sector workers are a necessity. It's even assumed that there's just 'waste' to be cut and growth can still emerge from this process. Oh yes, the new mantra is deficit reduction and growth - an oxymoron of the highest order. Even if the aims of the cuts go as far as deficit reduction, it would seem that the cuts are insufficient in this aim and may actually increase the deficit as unemployment remains high. The Right will naturally prescribe another round of cuts. For a long time it seemed that the possible had become impossible, yet today most of us can see cuts aren't the way out of this recession and no one dares to reach for the alternatives.

On the Tumbril.

The pretensions of travail, famille, patrie were done away with swiftly on May 6th. The French voter took the Rat Man to the tumbril and placed the Flanby in the Élysée Palace. Well, Hollande will take office tomorrow to be exact. He won 55% of the vote on a platform calling for an end to austerity, though Hollande may have defined himself as the successor to Mitterand he had plenty of words in the right tone as he spoke about a great change across Europe. This is the first time in France for 30 years that an incumbent lost a second term - a testament to the strange times we live in. Sarkozy now joins the ranks of Berlusconi as just another establishment right-winger to be knocked out of power in the midst of the Eurocrisis. The appalling attempts to grab the frothing racist vote shocked many, it was ultimately too much for the supposed pragmatism of French politics. The major point is that the tough-love programme of tax-cuts for the rich and public service cuts for the rest of society has been rejected.

As Mark Hanna would remind us "There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can't remember the second." Word has it that £40 million of funds in the Rat Man's campaign chest came from the dearly missed Colonel Gaddafi. There has since been talk of $65 million and another despot Alexander Lukashenko has claimed that the actual amount was $100 million. Whatever the case it has long been clear that Sarkozy is a creep, a wannabe de Gaulle with that trope of French chauvinism - the suspicion of the Anglo-Saxons. That went as far as claiming the economic crisis is an 'Anglo-Saxon disease' even though Sarkozy had posed as a French Thatcherite. He suggested taking a Kärcher to the neighbourhoods affected in the riots of 2005. Supposedly it was Bernard-Henri Levy persuaded him to wage war on Libya. Really, it was probably the rebel's promise to respect old oil arrangements that made it clear Gaddafi was no longer a necessity in North Africa.

On May Day Sarkozy demanded of trade unions "Put down your red flag, and serve France instead." It was an impotent call, he had to have people brought into town to be filmed in front of the Eiffel Tower. Nonetheless, this dwarf embodied the spirit of reaction in French politics coming at the end of a long line from the Thermidoreans through Pétain to d'Estaing. This may be another instance of the Europeans taking out the incumbent for the other guy, but this time it is a guy who was calling for a stop to cuts. Hollande may retreat from this to some extent, if not all together. We have yet to see. The German elections are coming up and if we see a swing to the centre-Left there could be a shift in policy which might lead to a domino effect across Europe. Naturally the European ruling-class has already seen this coming and they're prepared for a fight. Not everything is going to plan, but it'll take a bit more from the people of Europe to derail this out-of-control train.

Business as Usual.

The process we have endured over the last 40 years was the nightmare of classical economists. The fear was that the merchants and manufacturers would conspire to shape public policy in their favour, that they would do business abroad - investing abroad and importing from abroad. It would rake in enormous profits, but England would have been ruined. Adam Smith argued that the merchants and manufacturers would give priority to their own country, as if by an "invisible hand" England would be saved in this way. Since the 1970s we have witnessed de-industrialisation at home combined with off-shoring of production abroad and shifting to finance over industry. The causes of the crisis are barely discussed, we just have to look forward to the way out. We're no far from the nightmare of classical economists. But it's been pretty awful for a lot of ordinary people and it could get worse. There is no "invisible hand" in sight.

We the British tend to love business as usual. That was evident in the 1930s when we lined up to vote for Conservatives who wanted to sell-off chunks of Europe to Hitler. We don't like to recall just how compromised the Establishment really was. It may have gone as far as the Royal Family, the House of Lords and the proprietors of major newspapers. Even Churchill said in 1937 "I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between communism and Nazism, I would choose communism." When it went wrong and no amount of appeasement could hold-off the inevitable there wasn't much else to do but stand still under the bombs. The people with any means available to them would escape to the countryside. For the lot left behind there was plenty of time to rob bombed out houses and even steal from the dying. Even firemen were caught looting buildings, the fires of which they had just put out. People were crushed to death in the panics to rush into the underground for safety.

David Cameron might be more Chamberlain than Churchill, but for the most part we've managed to stir clear of the spirit of the Blitz with the exception of the riots last summer. Still, it's not really a fair comparison. Between September 1940 and May 1941 there were over 4,500 known cases of looting and juvenile crime made up almost 50% of all arrests. And yet huge gains were won for the working-class movement after the war. The only moves we're seeing to secure those gains have been the odd strike. Officially 400,000 people marched this week in London over pensions, the crowd included 20,000 coppers, and London Occupy has sprung up once again. This is the ongoing resistance to the cuts that hasn't been going on in the US. The courageous protests across the pond in Wisconsin and on Wall Street (which shouldn't be sneered at) have been blips on that vast land-mass. There are huge differences, in Europe we're seeking to protect the social democratic accomplishments of the last century while in America these victories have yet to be won.

Freedom or Death.

We have seen large-scale demonstrations across Europe, including general strikes in Portugal, Spain, Germany and France. The most heroic of resistances has been fought in Greece, which has been hit badly by the crisis to say the least. Of course, there is a lack of coordination on a continental scale, so the bursts of rage are sporadic and unpredictable. Europe still has something of an organised Left, which America barely has anymore. Perhaps history only ended, as Fukuyama suggested, in the US. The emergent SYRIZA, a coalition of leftist parties, which has been making significant gains in the recent Greek elections. The coalition is only 2% behind New Democracy, the conservatives who are closest to taking power. Even the Communist have won 8% of the vote and the Democratic Left got 6%, while PASOK has fallen to 13%. It looks unlikely that the Greek Left will be able to form a coalition government due to differences over austerity and the usual sectarianism that plagues the Left wherever it can be sniffed.

It's possible that New Democracy and PASOK will form a government, - the equivalent of Labour cutting a deal with the Tories - a capitalist bulwark to push through austerity and wait until the socialist storm passes. In retrospect, the victory in France for the established Left holds greater significance with the gains of the radical Left in Greece taken into account. The ruling-class is determined to reconstitute the status quo and get its way. The fight isn't over, though some would prefer to turn our attention to the presence of the Golden Dawn in the Hellenic Parliament. This seems to overestimate the possibilities of a return to Metaxism in Greece, given the gains that the neo-fascists have made are still dwarfed by those of the Left. We shouldn't fool ourselves that these herds could put together the Fourth Reich. The Greek Left needs to push further and be on guard against any possible attacks Golden Dawn might launch on immigrants.

The rape of Greece has opened up all kinds of possibilities, it is an unstable situation. We're told not to sympathise with this profligate nation of wasters and yet this is where some of the longest hours in the world are worked. This is the birthplace of democracy which the Germans and the French have shown nothing but disdain. The Greeks remain remarkably in favour of European integration in spite of the garbage the Franco-German reactionaries have been trying to feed them. The country has been trashed for the sake of a right-wing experiment that was rushed into after Germany reunified. There are some profiteers in this crisis, Greek workers aren't being paid and are being fired across the board. SYRIZA are sticking to their guns, calling for the nationalisation of the banks, paying of the debts owed to pensioners and an end to "structural adjustments" in the jobs market. The Greeks are right to resist of the attempt to destroy the living standards of huge swathes of the population. Recall the old slogan: freedom or death.