Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson
Verso, London, 1998, £17.00, hb
I haven’t had this book very long, have only had time to read it (quickly) once, so this is by way of an interim report. But a second reading won’t change my mind that this is a very good book. I enjoyed this more than anything else I have read for years. It is also an important book. There have been critics of the free market and the New World Order before – but no-one has treated these subjects with such elegant contempt. All the nauseating bullshit of the past twenty years is trashed in this book: free market ideology, theory and practice; its proponents and apologists; the New World Order, the supposed benefits of globalisation and the EU; the genteel London Left’s delusions (notably about the EU and constitutional change); New Labour’s rag-bag of dotty ideas, its barely understood American economic theories and authoritarian bits and pieces from Far Eastern totalitarian regimes – all are briskly and ruthlessly rubbished in clear, punchy language.
Elliot and Atkinson are on the Guardian economics team – Elliot is the Economics editor and Atkinson the City reporter – and those economic pages are just about the the only area consistently worth reading in the increasingly brain-dead Guardian. They believe that most economic theory is baloney and that most of it is simply intellectual cover for economic gangsterism. Show them an economic theory and they look to see who’s ripping-off what. Elliot and Atkinson do not believe, in Tony Frewin’s exquisite phrase, that the global free market is the default setting for the universe.
All the shibboleths of the current era are presented, examined, falsified and dismissed in these pages. It’s all bollocks, mate, say E and A, bollocks perpetrated by thieves and their idiots. Wonderful stuff.