"I believe there are certain things that are not at issue at all. ... And that is his character": Why we are still living in 1991, Part II.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece showing how the world of 1991 was still very much with us today. And if you ignore the bit where I confidently predicted a second Clinton would sit in the Oval Office, the comparisons between 1991 and the late 2010s hold up reasonably well.

This week, the US political scene has witnessed the spectacle of a presidential nominee to the Supreme Court being accused of sexual misconduct, the brave testimony of his accuser, and a combative response of the potential justice.. The parallels to 1991 apparently aren't done yet. 

In the summer of that year, the first African American Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, was retiring. In his place, George HW Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, another African American, who had been an official in the Reagan and Bush administrations, as well as a federal judge. Yet Thomas provoked panic and fear amongst those on the left. He was a strident conservative, and many liberals promised they would fight his nomination in the last ditch. The battle lines were drawn for his confirmation hearings.

Hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee were not to be treated lightly. It was only four years since the same committee, headed by the same senator, a Joe Biden of Delaware, had sunk the nomination of Robert Bork. Bork had been chosen by Reagan for his impeccable conservative credentials. Yet during his hearings Bork floundered, as his conservative views came under attack for being too extreme, as did his role in the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, when Bork had been the highest ranking Justice Department official to survive Richard Nixon's cull, the one who had fired the Watergate special prosecutor for Nixon. Bork was rejected by the committee, and later voted down by the full senate.

Despite the concerns over Thomas' views, and the power of the hearings, during the autumn of 1991 his nomination wound its way through the hearings. Towards the end of the process, a bomb was detonated under this orderly process. The media leaked that the FBI background checks on Thomas had thrown up reports that Thomas had made unwanted, sexually inappropriate remarks to a colleague, Anita Hill. Hill, now a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, was called before the committee to give evidence. What evidence she gave. The US public were treated to comments about the size of Thomas' penis, comments about pubic hair, about how long Thomas could last in bed, about Thomas' favourite porn stars.

But Thomas wasn't going down without a fight. In his own testimony, he denied everything, and claimed he was the subject of a "lynching." As a black man, the language was emotional, and designed to hit home.

It did the trick, but barely. The Judiciary Committee sent Thomas' name to the full Senate without a recommendation to accept or reject, a very rare move. Thomas was confirmed by the full Senate with 52 votes to 48, and not along party lines either. Some Democrats supported Thomas, while some Republicans tried to stop him taking office. But take office he did.

It is easy to see the parallels between the two events. In both 1991 and 2018, an extremely conservative choice to sit on the US Supreme Court fired up opposition to his confirmation. Liberal activists and interest groups draw a line in the sand. As the hearings come to a close, allegations of sexual misconduct emerge. They culminate in a dramatic showdown before the Senate, with accuser and defender both fighting for their lives and pouring out their souls.

However, there are two major differences between the hearings of 1991, and the hearings of 2018. Firstly, in 1991, Hill was questioned by the full committee. The optics, and the message they sent, were awful. An all male, all white, mainly elderly, committee, fired questions at the young black woman in front of them, some of them questions of an extremely explicit nature. The outrage at how Hill was treated bled into the 1992 general election. Bush was not re-elected, and a record number of women were swept into office. The Republican party have clearly taken this message on board. The mixed gender, mixed racial Democratic team on the 2018 Judiciary Committee posed their own questions to Brett Kavanaugh's accuser. The all male, all white Republicans of 2018 picked a female prosecutor to field their questions. They do not want to pour oil on the flames of an already difficult election year.

Secondly, in 1991, Anita Hill's lone voice was not enough to stop Clarence Thomas making it onto the Supreme Court. Thomas narrowly survived the process, and remains on the Court to this day, as the longest serving current justice. One reason the Bush White House stuck with Thomas was that opinion polls showed the vast majority of people believed his denials over Anita Hill's claims of sexual harrassment. In 2018, although the process has not yet reached its endgame, Kavanaugh's chances of ending up a Justice of the Supreme Court look less good than Thomas' did at this stage. Because millions of people believe Dr Christine Blasey Ford, his accuser.

I believe her. And you should too. We owe it to the people of 2018 to show that we are not really still living in 1991.

(To help me write this, I drew on this excellent article from the New York Times. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/us/politics/anita-hill-kavanaugh-hearings.html

What struck me was how some of the senators who questioned Hill in 1991 are *still* in the same roles, and have apparently learnt nothing...)

"Financial Armageddon"

What would financial Armageddon look like?

It probably says a lot that I can clearly remember this article, a full decade on, down to being able to remember the title, and some of the lines. It really did look like Armageddon at the time. In the autumn of 2008, the Western capitalist model of the world was staring into the abyss, and no one could be quite sure we wouldn't go crashing down into it.

I couldn't explain what caused it. I'm not sure, even now, anyone could explain for certain the causes, without either being very biased, or so technical no one understood them. But, with a handful of exceptions, most people did not know what was coming. Until the end of 2008, there had been gathering storm clouds, but most of it was hidden from full view. In late 2007, there'd been a run on Northern Rock, and the government had been forced to nationalise it. In the United States, there were serious concerns over the state of the mortgage market. But for most people, these were concerns in a far away land, that of economics, that none of them really understood.

Until on September 15th, 2008, the US investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. It wasn't a bank in the sense most people understood. They had no branches, no current accounts of individuals. Instead, they dealt with the money of companies, taking it and investing it in other things, to look for a return. During the 1990s and 2000s, many banks had done this more and more. The lines between 'high street' banks and 'investment' banks was increasingly blurred. More worryingly, no one really knew where all this money, and associated debt, actually was. When Lehman Brothers, one of the oldest and most venerable names in world finance, applied for bankruptcy protection, this sent shockwaves around the system. Someone had owned up to how bad this situation was. The image of bankers, the new frontier of the 21st century economy, emptying their offices in cardboard boxes, showed how the mighty had fallen.

What made it worse was the Bush administration. Saddled as we are now with Trump, it is hard to think back on how awful Bush was. In the dying days of his presidency, Bush had found himself having to hand out money to mortgage lenders and banks. In September 2008, he decided enough was enough. His administration wouldn't get Lehman Brothers out of the hole they had fallen in to. They would be allowed to collapse.

Big mistake. This turned alarm into a full blown panic. Around the world, banks stopped lending money, as they were afraid of getting themselves into more and more debt. People and companies who had put their money into these labyrinthine schemes began to withdraw it, afraid it would all be lost. With the money supply freezing up, ordinary businesses found themselves out of money too.

In an intertwined global financial economy, the contagion and chaos in the USA spread around the world like wildfire. In the UK, the banks of the City of London found themselves buffeted by the same storms. But the UK's banks were slightly different. The same banks dabbling in international investment schemes were those that people held their money in. If they went down, all hell would break loose. Alistair Darling, the then Chancellor, has since said he was afraid of a breakdown of law and order if the most exposed bank, RBS (containing Natwest and Ulster Bank), closed.

The Bush administration realised it had made a grave error. In the parlance of the time, they had tried to show that no one was 'too big to fail.' And they'd turned a problem into a crisis. As September faded into October, the US Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, devised a plan to put up $700 billion, to 'hoover up' the debt that no one really knew who owned it. The US House of Representatives voted the plan down, wiping billions off of the world stock markets. Days later, they accepted a modified version of Paulson's plan. But the world money markets failed to respond. The money supply was still jammed.

Enter the unlikely hero of the hour. 

Since then, Gordon Brown has got a lot of bad press. He was not a telegenic politician, and inspired loathing and contempt in many. But he had the best economic brain in the land, and this was his hour. Between Brown and Darling, they unveiled a plan which did two things. Like in the USA, it would take the worthless debt out of the banks' hands. But it would also see the UK government take shares in banks in danger of collapse. In effect, those banks would be backed by the full weight of the UK economy. This worked. The pressure on them eased. In the USA, Paulson used his new powers to copy Brown's plan. As 2008 turned into 2009, the immediate crisis passed. In late 2008, Gordon Brown slipped up at Prime Minister's Questions. He meant to say the government had saved the banks; he accidentally said saved the world. The Tories opposite mocked him mercilessly. But he was right.

All of us have lived with the consequences since. In the short term, the lack of money available for companies and businesses led to a deep, painful recession, the worst in living memory. The £500 billion that Brown and Darling poured into the UK financial markets left the government in massive debt. When Labour went down to electoral defeat in 2010, the new Coalition government made it a priority to pay those debts back, which it did by sharply cutting spending on other government services. In the UK, this double whammy of deep recession and government cutbacks has led to what many have termed a 'lost decade.' My generation, those of us who came into the workforce during this lost decade, will live with the impact of the autumn of 2008 forever, as it forecast we will never catch up with our parents, or those below us, in terms of lost earnings.

But it is the psychological impact that has lingered most. At the time, there was outrage that the greed of investment bankers had taken us to edge of the precipice, peered over, and nearly taken the entire Western world with them. 'Banker bashing' became an accepted part of life, and it became toxic to say that you worked in the City of London, or on Wall Street. But those responsible were not held to account, save in some minor and token ways. The decade of low growth and austerity that followed wouldn't have been solved by jailing some City of London executives. But the notion did take hold that those at the top had wreaked havoc, and had been allowed to get away with it. It was believed that the notion, of those in far away places living it up at the expense of those struggling to get by, would benefit political parties of the left. Instead, it is the populist right that has seized the narrative and run with it. It is just possible, in the images of tumbling market and bankers losing their jobs, to see the shadows of Donald Trump, Brexit, and any number of backlash screams, coming to being in the background.

What I can clearly remember was how it felt. I was 18, in the last few weeks before I headed off to university, and the entire world seemed to be falling in. I followed the story avidly. It was my first introduction to economics, American politics, and the first clear difference in UK politics I was aware of. It was also the first truly global historic event that I had ever lived through. It shaped my outlook on how the world should, and could, be run. I will always remain a child of 2008.