The course of this debate, mediated by Emily Maitlis, was predictable enough; the Activist articulately incandescent, the Banker moderate and a bit apologetic despite the activist's attempts to interrupt. Where it got really interesting however was the point at which the Banker said, the real reason for the crisis is Socialism (gasps from Maitlis and the Activist), which is to say that governments all around the world - Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Greece - had spent too much money, not daring to tell their electorates that this spending was unaffordable.
Now personally I don't remember George W Bush's government being terribly socialist - and Dubya was an intemperate spender - but nevertheless the broader point is probably true. Governments did live on borrowed money, and they did lack the political courage to balance their budgets - after all, things were going so well, weren't they?
This infuriated the Activist, by now almost beside herself. How dare a rich banker blame the governments that had tried to protect the interests of ordinary working people? I can see that, from her shoes, hearing this kind of stuff from a besuited fat cat must have been annoying. In times of austerity, it's galling to see some people utterly unaffected. But the facts rather bear the Banker out.
In Britain, a Labour government (which I voted for) consistently ran a deficit from about 2001 onwards. Labour supporters loved the Government's economic success. We enjoyed the tax take coming from the City of London's profits, deregulated by Gordon Brown. We were not only running the economy better than the Tories, but we were rebuilding Britain's social infrastructure. And yet when recession came the cupboard was bare, and, as I have noted many times here, the Government had no choice but to go to the markets to keep the economy afloat. That we are now so dependent on the gilt markets is not their fault, but ours.
The problem for the activist and other people like her is that no amount of taxing the rich or well-paid will fill the holes in Western budgets. There just aren't enough rich people. There are many, many more middle-income earners. So while basic considerations of fairness might indicate higher taxes for the affluent, in fact doing so is gesture politics. The reality is that we were all deluded into believing that the consumer paradise would last forever, and in future we are all going to have lower standards of living.
And what alternative plans do the Activist and others like her in the Occupy movement have? What do they want?, Emily Maitlis asked. For the first time the Activist looked flustered. If I could have worked out what her answer meant I would record it here. But the best paraphrase I can supply is, None.
I have some sympathy with the Occupy movements. It was never fair in the good times for CEOs to get billions while their immigrant cleaners got peanuts (and paid tax at a higher rate), and it's even less so now. CEOs are too close to the people who decide what their remuneration should be, and shareholders have too little influence over the process. I have a few shares here and there, and a couple of times a year I get a letter telling me I've earned a £17.50 dividend. No one has ever told me, "And by the way, if we hadn't been paying the CEO 9 million, you'd have had £175.00 instead". What's needed to curb the City's excesses is greater transparency over the pay process and better regulation than the botch job put in place by Gordon Brown.
But there is a broader point. I also have grave doubts about the eternal-growth project upon which our prosperity is said to depend. Growth will come in future in the markets with growing populations, perhaps India in particular. But if the population is going to carry on growing and we are all going to get more affluent, more and more resources will be used up and more and more of the planet will be despoiled. My principal objection to Wall St and The City is not that its occupants are greedy or unprincipled, but that they are part of a system to which we are all bound and which is probably not sustainable.
So actually the Occupy movement needs to do some hard thinking. What does it want, and what would a future without growth look like? How could it be made to work fairly? The authorities in New York and London should not be kicking the protestors out. It should be making them stay there until they can think of some coherent solutions.
