This week, the European parliament took a strong lurch to the left. That is not quite the story that you may have read elsewhere — with most headlines stating that Europe has taken a lurch to the right — but it is the inevitable conclusion if you analyse the results from Sunday’s election from the perspective of what most people in Britain understand to be the left-right divide.
Take any political issue in Britain, from schools to public spending, and the left-wing position is generally taken to mean one of greater state intervention, greater command of the economy by government. The right-wing position is taken to mean one of smaller government, freer markets, less regulation. Why then, does a party like France’s Front National — which advocates protectionism and welfarism, and which opposes globalisation — end up being called ‘far right’?
If the Front National is far right, then the centre-right must be all about partial protectionism, a tendency to see welfare as a public good and to be a little suspicious of globalisation. Yet that all sounds more like an Ed Miliband manifesto. True, back in the 1970s Jean-Marie Le Pen once adorned his racist views with economically liberal ideas. But that is a long time ago. This week’s election marks the completion of a remarkable transition across Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall: from Sweden to Greece, the nasty parties have, in important ways, become more far-left than far-right. The parties which triumphed this week are those which offer a perfectly logical combination of xenophobia, nationalism and state authoritarianism.
Perfectly logical, but profoundly wrong. While many of the representatives of global capitalism — bankers, tax-avoiding international corporations and so on — have turned out to have feet of clay, the greatest damage to economies has come from governments which tried to borrow their way out of a debt crisis, then tried to rig markets so as to re-inflate financial bubbles which kept their coffers full.
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