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[/audioplayer]Friends of capitalism feared that the events since 2007 — the financial collapses, bailouts, deficits and austerity — would produce a massive swing to the left, but it hasn’t happened. Voters have consistently chosen sensible, middle-of-the-road parties that undertook to steady the ship rather than sail in completely different directions. In reacting to the biggest crisis to engulf the free enterprise system for decades we’ve learnt that the spirit of the anti-capitalists is willing but their flesh is weak — and also that they’re simply aren’t enough of them. They can’t even read the books that they buy. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time did have the dubious honour of being the most unread book of recent times but then came Thomas Piketty; the French economist and unlikely rock-star thinker of the global equality movement. The Occupy Wall Street crowd bought his book in large numbers but guesstimates derived from Amazon suggest that the average reader may not have got much past page 26 of the 685-page tome. Capital in the 21st Century became a global bestseller but only 3.8 per cent of the pristine-looking book that sits ostentatiously on the coffee table, next to the latest works of Naomi Klein and Paul Mason, may have actually been read. ‘They started but couldn’t quite climax’ is set to be the epitaph of the anti-capitalist movement. With Jeremy Corbyn they may take over the Labour party but they won’t get into Downing Street. With the socialist senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, they’ll give Hillary Clinton a bloody nose in the primaries but they won’t prevent her winning the Democratic party’s nomination. Even in Greece, where the angries did win power, there was a lot of huffing and puffing but eventually they surrendered and agreed to enact more Thatcherite reforms in ten days than the Iron Lady managed in ten years.
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