A checklist of 4 key items will determine the nature of this new Government and its likely fate.    They are:

1   Who will carry the burden of the big spending cuts which the Tories have repeatedly declared their intention to impose in this next year and which the LibDems have now succumbed to?   If it is low-paid public sector workers – nurses, teachers, porters, dinner ladies, low-level administrative staff, local government workers – rather than the top echelons especially the bankers with their bonus millions, there will be serious social unrest – maybe not on the Greek scale, but certainly enough to prevent a Tory election victory any time in the next year.

2   Will robust banking reform be introduced which would stop a recurrence of the recent financial meltdown?   This must require a splitting up of the banks between their retail High Street arms and their casino investment arms, otherwise there is no guaranteed  mechanism to prevent a further crash.   Equally, the bloated City of London needs to be thinned down to a size proportionate to the British economy and the manufacturing sector, the lifeblood of the economy, needs to be correspondingly expanded.   Will the Tories show the toughness of purpose to realise this necessity and implement it?

3   Will the Tories end the era of de-regulation (probably the single most important cause of the financial breakdown) and privatisation of services, especially in the NHS and education?   Cameron has denounced PFI as busted system: will he now close it down?

4   Britain is now the most unequal and most unfair society for a century, fragmented between a large sullen alienated under-class and an elite at the top with stratospheric wealth and inordinate power.   Will the Old Etonian PM now suppress his natural class instincts in the wider interests of the country as a whole, as he constantly proclaims, and put the greater equalising of income, wealth and power as the major social goal of his government?

If Cameron has the courage and magnanimity to do these things, he may well succeed at least for a time.   If not, Britain will burn.

Arguably the most telling characteristic of any society is the degree of inequality.   In Britain’s case it has not only grown in the last two decades to previously unheard-of dimensions, it has even spawned a new social class system and deconstructed the whole concept of aspiration and social mobility.   It has made the facile division of Britain into working class/middle class or Middle England versus the rest wholly otiose.   That does not begin to reflect the ugly social reality of UK 2010.

The distinctive features of the social landscape are no longer the gradual assimilation of an upwardly mobile working class into a broad-tent middle class, but rather the distinctive polarisation at either end of the spectrum into extremes of alienation.   Richard Lambert, president of the CBI no less, has recently referred to the gargantuan greed and bonuses of the hyper-wealthy, perhaps 1-2% of the population, as marking them out as aliens.  

At the other end, little recognised and discarded on the scrap heap by all the political parties, is a large growing bitter rejectionist surly under-class numbering as much as 15% of the British nation today. The don’t participate, they don’t compete, they don’t vote, they don’t care.   They are possessed of low self-esteem, disdain of others, a demi-monde of delinquent survival, a sub-culture of hopelessness.

The figures are shameful.   Those living in extreme poverty – below 40% of the median income – are now 0.7 million more than a decade and a half ago, and the average real incomes of the poorest tenth have actually fallen by 2% in the decade before 2008, even before the recession will have pushed the total to a million or more.   The super-rich at the same time have hit a bonanza beyond the dreams of Croesus.   In the last year alone the wealth of the richest 1,000 individuals has soared by a staggering £77 billions, by no less than 30%, to a total of £335 billions today.

To talk now of being a one-nation Tory (as Cameron has done) or even a one-nation New Labourite is just for the birds.   Britain is now a more unequal society even than under Mrs. Thatcher.   If equality is the lodestone of a civilised society, we are now further away from the foundations of decency and civilisation than for a hundred years.   Yet it speaks volumes about the election campaign now ending that poverty, inequality and stratospheric wealth have been scarcely even mentioned.    If the new Parliament is to inaugurate renewal, a mass movement like the Levellers, the Chartists and the suffragettes will be needed afresh to reverse the current obscenities of greed and power.

The latest media take on this election is that some major subterranean disturbance has occurred deep below the political surface, only nobody will be sure what it is until too late.   It really isn’t that difficult, if only our over-paid and often rather lazy media would look in the right direction and not avert their eyes from what is painfully obvious.   Sadly they won’t do that because it challenges their, as well as the politicians’, comfort zone.

It isn’t of course one mysterious thing that’s gone wrong, but a steady build-up in disillusionments.   And it’s pretty clear what they are:

• the recession has taken a heavy toll, and whilst the bankers are recognised to have caused it, Labour is seen to have pampered the accursed bankers at the expense of their victims – the voters.   The Government didn’t regulate the banks properly in the first place, then refused to prevent them from starving businesses and homeowners of credit, and now allows them to flaunt their multi-billion profits and outsize bonuses when everyone else is struggling.
• the let-the-markets-rip culture which Thatcher started and New Labour promoted further has knocked the stuffing out of a sense of a responsible and caring society.   It has undermined accountability and trust in leadership.   It  cultivated spin and manipulation which has fostered distrust in authority, and culminated in the horrendous expenses scandal which destroyed all confidence in the system of governance.
• the grotesque ballooning of inequality has created an elite of stratospheric wealth at the same time as an increasingly alienated under-class of some 15% or more of the population, which has spawned a poison of simmering resentment, social fragmentation, and despair.   There are 2,500,000 unemployed: how many people realise what it’s like to have to live on jobseeker’s allowance of £65.45 a week if you’re over 25 and £51.85 a week if you’re undedr 25?
• the growing centralisation of power in our society, again started by Thatcher and taken further still by Blair, has left millions of people feeling helpless and frustrated when things go wrong.   Power is now even more unequally distributed than income.   The elites in the City of London, the Big Business corporations, and the Murdoch media empire, along with No.10, monopolise most of the power today with impunity, and the powerlessness and anger felt by almost evertone else is palpable on the doorstep.

Is then New Labour’s plight now so surprising when it has discarded all the values and principles that once enabled the Labour Party faithfully to represent the needs and aspirations of a majority of people in this country?

There are 3 issues which should dominate tonight’s debate on the economy, but probably won’t:

1. Fundamental banking reform is now urgently needed if another, and possibly lethal, financial-economic collapse is to avoided.   We now know that the meltdown in 2008-9 was caused, not just by greed and recklessness, but by deliberate fraud, as the current Goldman Sachs prosecution in the US now shows.   But it wasn’t just the US – fraud is now being revealed in Ireland, Iceland, Switzerland, as well as in the UK.   The charge in the US is that a Goldman Vice-President created a dud financial instrumentspacked by valueless sub-prime mortgages at the instruction of a hedge fund client Paulson, sold it to investors knowing it was worthless, and then allowed their own hedge fund client to move in for a killing.   Goldham says the buyers were sophisticated mortgage investors – it’s more like a used car salesmanflogging a broken car he’s got from some up-market barrow boy to some driver who can’t access the log-book.   The moral of all this is that the banks need breaking up, the hedge funds very tightly regulated, and the more arcane and exotic derivatives prohibited.
2. Then there’s inequality – the rich/poor divide which has now reached the proportions of Victorian society a century ago.   The Tories would of course let this explode further, not only weakening Sure Start and the 3,500 children centres in deprived areas and cutting the invaluable working family tax credits, but cutting inheritance tax on the rich and ending the very modest 50% rate on the bankers and top executives.   We need a much more progressive income tax, much more vigorous action against those who cheat by tax avoidance/evasion, and an end to the outrageious non dom privileges for the ultra-rich.
3. The other really big issue is funding for businesses, jobs and homes.   The Tory priority for major premature public spending cuts will stife the precarious recovery at birth and could well precipitate the deadly double-dip recession that most economists fear.   Banks contiue to starve deserving businesses of credit.   Families concentrate on paying off debt rather than spending, which is understandable but robs the economy of momentum.   The major support for the recovery – 0.6% over the last 6 months – has been public spending, and any government cuts it at the country’s peril.