After the excesses of free market fundamentalism, the pendulum is ready to swing.(News)

BYLINE: Allister Sparks

As the financial crisis sweeps like a rip tide across the world, it is surely inevitable that a political reaction will follow.

The crisis is being described as the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and that certainly had political consequences. From the fall of the Weimar Republic to the rise of Hitler, World War 2 and the Cold War, and from the Holocaust to the establishment of the state of Israel, there flowed a sequence of events that traumatised the entire century and changed the world.

Not that this crisis is comparable to the Great Depression. It may indeed be the worst financial upheaval since then, but it is not on the same scale as that cataclysmic event. But it is certainly enough to shake up the certitudes of the free market fundamentalists and their faith that, left to itself, the market will always self-regulate and ultimately bring benefits to everyone, if not in equal measure, at least to an acceptable degree in accordance with individual enterprise.

So the neo-liberal formula became to cut taxes, reduce budgets, shrink …