It’s banks, rather than citizens, who now shape a country’s destiny

In the novel Catch 22, one of the central characters is an entrepreneurial war profiteer by the name of Milo Minderbinder. Caught red-handed in the act of plundering his fellow countrymen, Milo enjoys evoking “the historic right of free men to pay as much as they have to for the things they need in order to survive”. When the price of food in the army mess hall climbs so high due to Milo’s profiteering that enlisted men can no longer afford to eat, Milo valiantly cites the alternative; and since he despises coercion and is a champion of the free-market, the alternative is the freedom of the enlisted men to starve.

Britain today is increasingly dominated by Milo Minderbinders. Rather than enjoying the flowering of freedom we were told the market would inevitably bring with it, people’s lives are more than ever dictated by forces completely outside of their control. Trapped in an endless cycle of longer working hours and greater debt; and with a political class demanding that services are mercilessly rolled back to pay for a crisis of the banks, ordinary people find themselves in a situation not unlike that prevailing in Catch 22 – that is, one in which a powerful establishment has the right to “do anything we can’t stop them from doing”.

I am not, as it happens, talking about the political establishment here. While the formal trappings of democracy continue to function and reassure, it is becoming increasingly clear that the political class is beholden to a much greater power than that of the ballot box alone. And yet, while there may at times be a quiet acknowledgment of this dynamic in public, we are still at a stage where the subject is hastily changed when the full consequences of the discovery are grasped. The idea that life has been sucked out of democracy by the very philosophy that was supposed to engender it is still unpalatable to a large proportion of people. To put it bluntly, during the last 30 years or so politics has been gradually reduced to a question of what is or is not acceptable to “the markets”; and to get a clearer picture of what this means, it is perhaps best to substitute mention of “the markets” for the words “the bankers”.

Of late, the growth in the unaccountable power of bankers has led increasingly to political absurdities that few people are yet ready to recognise as absurd. Only last week the Prime Minister returned from Europe to be feted for standing up for democratic accountability by the very people who most strongly believe in the unaccountable rule of bankers. Perversely, the treaty Cameron was berated so thoroughly by the Labour Party and the Lib Dems for rejecting was itself a project designed to impose continent-wide Friedmanite economics by force of state decree. What Cameron vetoed was, in other words, a treaty designed almost wholly to placate Europe’s Milo Minderbinders.

A common rebuttal used against people of the left in the past was that there was “no alternative” to the rampant free-market. This glib remark was usually framed in terms of there being no practical economic system that could equal capitalism in terms of maintaining both prosperity and freedom without explicitly compromising either. And undeniably the words did have a certain power until recently – things did not look particularly good for the left during the 1990s, however pleased many of were to see the back of the Eastern Bloc.

The autopilot no alternative response is still tossed around in the face of protest and dissent today, despite the almighty crash that the “only practical” system produced in 2008. What has changed, however, is the meaning behind the words. Today when a person evokes the clause what they are actually implying is that should government implement policy change that strays too far from the interests of one group in particular, all economic hell will be unleashed. In other words, there is no alternative today because no alternative will be permitted.

In Catch 22, whenever objections are raised to a state of affairs that results in ever greater hardship for the majority but increased profits for himself, Milo parrots the dictat that what is good for the company is good for all. When this leads to his own squadron being bombed and left without food, his solution is to call for an even greater marketisation of the army. “Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry,” he says.

Sound familiar?

While Catch 22 may be just a novel, and Milo Minderbinder a character dreamt up in the imagination of Joseph Heller, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the situation we find ourselves in today. In our own case, as in the case of catch 22 in the novel, until we acknowledge where real power lies there is no way the rule of the bankers can be repealed, undone, denounced or overthrown.

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