Do you suffer from political impotence? Fed up with paying for other people's mistakes? Global economy getting you down?

DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

We live in progressive times. The present crisis offers an unprecedented opportunity to take control of our future, to decide what kind of society we want to live in. For three decades, we have treated the free market as a force of nature that must be obeyed or else. We've put up with working long hours in unrewarding jobs, the collapse of industry, and an ever-growing gap between the richest and the rest because that was what we thought the market wanted. We could not afford to do things differently - or so we were led to believe.

Now governments the world over are spending public money like there's no tomorrow, it transpires that we do not have to obey the dictates of the free marketeers after all. We can choose, and the decisions we take, the investments we make, the businesses we bail out and the businesses we let fold, will determine the sort of society that will eventually emerge from this mess.

But there is a danger too - a danger that the detail of the day will overwhelm us and we will forget about the possibility of choice. The government, preoccupied with bailing out the financial sector, is at risk of blindly recreating the economy of yesterday. Propping up the banks is one thing - there will be some role for financial services in the economy of tomorrow - but they will never again be as profitable as once they appeared. Moreover, we cannot pretend that recovery is just a matter of restoring confidence, releasing credit and resuming business as usual. The evolution of the UK economy over the last twenty years has been premised on the productivity of finance - now that has been called into question, we are left with a division of labour that answers to non-existent needs.

So this is option one: underwrite the financial sector unconditionally, and subsidise the rest of the economy until the financial sector recovers. The result: all the injustices and inequalities of recent years, only this time poorer. Option two is to invest not only in banks but also in infrastructure, in our environment, in railways, in education, in industry, in research, in public spaces - in a diverse economy, a vibrant civil society, and a fairer future. But this option will require short-term sacrifice and long-term commitment. We will need imagination and endeavour. And we will have to do something about it right now.
 

As featured in the Guardian and the Independent