Johann Hari

This week, a disaster hit the United States, and the after-tremors will be shaking and breaking global politics for years. It did not grab the same press attention as the fall of liberal Kennedy-licking Massachusetts to a pick-up truck Republican, or President Obama’s first State of the Union address, or the possible break-up of Brangelina and their United Nations of adopted infants. But it took the single biggest problem dragging American politics towards brutality and dysfunction – and made it much, much worse. Yet it also showed the only path that Obama can now take to salvage his Presidency.

For over a century, the US has slowly put some limits – too few, too feeble – on how much corporations can bribe, bully or intimidate politicians. On Tuesday, they were burned away in one whoosh. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations can suddenly run political adverts during an election campaign – and there is absolutely no limit on how many, or how much they can spend. So if you anger Goldman Sachs by supporting legislation to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, you will smack into a wall of 24/7 ads exposing your every flaw. If you displease Exxon-Mobil by supporting legislation to deal with global warming, you will now be hit by a tsunami of advertising saying you are opposed to jobs and The American Way. If you rile the defence contractors by opposing the gargantuan war budget, you will face a smear-campaign calling you Soft on Terror.

Representative Alan Grayson says: “It basically institutionalizes and legalizes bribery on the largest scale imaginable. Corporations will now be able to reward the politicians that play ball with them – and beat to death the politicians that don’t… You won’t even hear any more about the Senator from Kansas. It’ll be the Senator from General Electric or the Senator from Microsoft.” In 2008, Exxon Mobil made profits of $85bn. So if they dedicated just 10 percent to backing a President who would serve their interests, they would have $8.5bn to spend – more than every candidate for President and every candidate for Senate spent at the last election. And that’s just one corporation.

To understand the impact this will have, you need to grasp how smaller sums of corporate money have already hijacked American democracy. Let’s look at a case that is simple and immediate and every American can see in front of them: healthcare. The United States is the only major industrialized democracy that doesn’t guarantee healthcare for all its citizens. The result is that, according to a detailed study by Harvard University, some 45,000 Americans die needlessly every year. That’s equivalent to 15 9/11s every year, or two Haitian earthquakes every decade.

This isn’t because the American people like it this way. Gallup has found in polls for a decade now that two-thirds believe the government should guarantee care for every American: they are as good and decent and concerned for each other as any European. No: it is because private insurance companies make a fortune today out of a system that doesn’t cover the profit-less poor, and can turn away the sickest people as “uninsurable”. So they pay for politicians to keep the system broken. They fund the election campaigns of politicians on both sides of the aisle, and in return, those politicians veto any system that doesn’t serve their paymasters. Look for example at Joe Lieberman, the former Democratic candidate for Vice-President. He has taken $448,066 in campaign contributions from private healthcare companies while his wife has raked in $2m as one of their chief lobbyists, and he has loyally blocked any attempt in the Senate to break the stranglehold of the health insurance companies and broaden coverage.

The US political system now operates within a corporate cage. If you want to run for office, you have to take corporate cash – and so you have to serve corporate interests. Corporations are often blatant in their corruption: it’s not unusual for them to give to both competing candidates in a Senate race, to ensure all sides are indebted to them. This runs so deep that Congressman James Clyburn says the US has become a “corpocracy.” It has reached the point that lobbyists now often write the country’s laws. Not metaphorically; literally. The former Republican congressman Walter Jones spoke out in disgust in 2006 when he found that drug company lobbyists were actually authoring the words of the Medicare prescription bill, and puppet-politicians were simply nodding it through.

But what happens if politicians are serving the short-term profit-hunger of corporations, and not the public interest? You only have to look at the shuttered shops outside your window for the answer. The banks were rapidly deregulated from the Eighties through the Noughties because their lobbyists paid politicians on all sides, and demanded their payback in rolled-back rules and tossed-away laws. As Senator Dick Durbin says simply: “The banks own the Senate,” so they had to obey. The result was that the banks made staggering profits – and were immediately rescued when they smashed the world economy. The only people who paid for it were the public, all over the world.

It is this corruption that has prevented Barack Obama from achieving anything substantial in his first year in office. How do you reregulate the banks, if the Senate is owned by Wall Street? How do you launch a rapid transition away from oil and coal to wind and solar, if the fossil fuel industry owns Congress? How do you break with a grab-the-oil foreign policy if Big Oil provides the invitation that gets you into the party of American politics?

His attempt at healthcare reform is dying because he thought he could only get through the Senate a system that the giant healthcare corporations and drug companies pre-approved. So he promised to keep the ban on bringing cheap drugs down from Canada, he pledged not to bargain over prices, and he dumped the idea of having a public option that would make sure ordinary Americans could actually afford it. The result was a Quasimodo healthcare proposal so feeble and misshapen that even the people of Massachusetts turned away in disgust.

Yet the corporations that caused this crisis are now being given yet more power. Bizarrely, the Supreme Court has decided that corporations are “persons”, so they have the “right” to speak during elections. But corporations are not people. Should they have the right to bear arms, or to vote? It would make as much sense. They are a legal fiction, invented by the state – and they can be fairly regulated to stop them devouring their creator. This is the same Supreme Court that ruled that the detainees at Guantanomo Bay are not “persons” under the constitution deserving basic protections. A court that says a living breathing human is less of a “person” than Lockheed Martin has gone badly awry.

Obama now faces two paths – the Clinton road, or the FDR highway. After he lost his healthcare battle, Clinton decided to simply serve the corporate interests totally. He is the one who carried out the biggest roll-back of banking laws, and saw the largest explosion of inequality since the 1920s. Some of Obama’s advisors are now nudging him down that path: the pledge for an appalling anti-Keynesian spending freeze on social programmes for the next three years to pay down the deficit is one of their triumphs.

But there is another way. Franklin Roosevelt began his Presidency trying to appease corporate interests – but he faced huge uproar and disgust at home when it became clear this left ordinary Americans stranded in the fog of a depression. He switched course. He turned his anger on “the malefactors of great wealth” and bragged: “I welcome the hatred… of the economic royalists.” He launched a programme of redistributing power from the corporations back towards the people, and put in place tough regulations that prevented economic disaster and spiralling inequality for three generations.

There were rare flashes of what Franklin Delano Obama would look like in his reaction to the Supreme Court decision. He said: “It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies, and other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americas.” But he has spent far more time coddling those interests than taking them on. The great pressure of strikes and protests put on FDR hasn’t yet arisen from a public dissipated into hopelessness by an appalling media that convinces them they are powerless and should wait passively for a Messiah.

Very little positive change can happen in the US until they clear out the temple of American democracy. In the State of the Union, Obama spent one minute on this problem, and proposed restrictions on lobbyists – but that’s only the tiniest of baby steps. He evaded the bigger issue. If Americans want a democratic system, they have to pay for it – and that means fair state funding for political candidates. Candidates are essential for the system to work: you may as well begrudge paying for the polling booths, or the lever you pull. At the same time, the Supreme Court needs to be confronted: when the Court tried to stymie the New Deal, FDR tried to pack it with justices on the side of the people. Obama needs to be pressured by Americans to be as radical in democratizing the Land of the Fee.

None of the crises facing us all – from the global banking system to global warming – can be dealt with if a tiny number of super-rich corporations have a veto over every inch of progress. If Obama funks this challenge now, he may as well put the US government on e-Bay and sell it to the highest bidder. How would we spot the difference?

I started reading James Hansen's new book, Storms of My Grandchildren, at the edge of a vanishing Arctic. I sat on a bare brown Greenland hillside listening to the ferocious crack and crash of the dying glaciers in the distance. As I watched the corpse of the ice sheet float by, broken into a thousand icebergs, it seemed the right place to begin the leading NASA scientist's explanation for what I was seeing. Since the year I was born, 1979, 40 percent of the Arctic sea ice has vanished. If we don't change our behavior fast, Hansen says I will live to see the day when it is all gone, and the North Pole is a point in the open ocean, reachable by boat. He stresses these are only the starting symptoms of a planetary fever that will remake the map of the world—and the capacity of human beings to survive on it. I finished reading the book at the Copenhagen climate summit, where the world's leaders gathered to offer a giant shrug.

Professor Hansen has been driven into a strange situation, and produced a strange book. For one-third of a century now, this cantankerous scientist has been more accurate in his predictions about global warming than anyone else alive. He saw these disastrous changes coming long before others did, and the U.S. government has tried to censor or sack him for his prescience. Now he has written a whistle-blower's account while still at the top: a story of how our political system is so wilfully, deliberately blind to environmental realities that we have no choice now but for American citizens to take direct physical action against the polluters. It's hardly what you expect to hear from the upper echelons of NASA: not a call to the stars, but a call to the streets. Toss a thousand scientific papers into a blender along with All the President's Men and Mahatma Gandhi, and you've got this riveting, disorienting book.

How did such an implausible American story come to pass?

To read the rest of this article at Slate magazine, click here.

In the dark, in the silence, in a blink, the age of the autonomous killer robot has arrived. It is happening. They are deployed. And – at their current rate of acceleration – they will become the dominant method of war for rich countries in the twenty-first century. These facts sound, at first, preposterous. The idea of machines that are designed to whirr out into the world and make their own decisions to kill is an old sci-fi fantasy – picture a mechanical Arnold Schwarzenegger blowing up a truck and muttering “Hasta la vista, baby.” But we live in a world of such whooshing technological transformation that the concept has leaped in just five years from the cinema screen to the battlefield – with barely anyone back home noticing.

When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, they had no robots as part of their force. By the end of 2005, they had 2400. Today, they have 12,000, carrying out 33,000 missions a year. A report by the US Joint Forces Command says autonomous robots will be the norm on the battlefield within twenty years.

The NATO forces now depend on a range of killer-robots, largely designed by the British Ministry of Defence labs privatized by Tony Blair in 2001. Every time you hear about a “drone attack” against Afghanistan or Pakistan, that’s an unmanned robot dropping bombs on human beings. Push a button and it flies away, kills, and comes home. Its robot-cousin on the battlefields below is called SWORDS: a human-sized robot that can see 360 degrees around it and fire its machine-guns at any target it “chooses.” Fox News proudly calls it “the G.I. of the twenty-first century.” And billions are being spent on the next generation of warbots, who will leave these models looking like a ZX Spectrum or the bulky box on which you used to play Pong.

At the moment, most are controlled by a soldier – often 7500 miles away – with a control panel. But insurgents are always inventing new ways to block the signal from the control centre, which causes the robot to shut down and ‘die.’ So the military is building ‘autonomy’ into the robots: if they lose contact, they start to make their own decisions, in line with a pre-determined code.

This is “one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human warfare,” according to P.W. Singer, a former analyst for the Pentagon and the CIA. In his must-read book ‘Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Defence in the Twenty-First century’, he warns: “Humanity has started to engineer technologies that are fundamentally different from all before. Our creations are now acting in and upon the world around us.”

Humans have been developing weapons that enabled us to kill at ever-greater distances and in ever-greater numbers for millennia, from the longbow to the cannon to the machine-gun to the nuclear bomb. But these robots mark a different stage. The earlier technologies made it possible for humans to decide to kill in more “sophisticated” ways – but once you programme and unleash an autonomous robot, the war isn’t fought by you any more: it’s fought by the machine. The subject of warfare shifts.

The military say this is a safer model of combat. Gordon Johnson of the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command says of the warbots: “They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.” Why take a risk with your soldier’s life, if he can stay in Arlington and kill in Kandahar? Think of it as War 4.0. There are proposals to bring this model home into domestic law enforcement too: the Department of Homeland Security recently requested money to buy eighteen drone planes to patrol the US-Mexico border.

But the evidence punctures this techno-optimism. We know the programming of robots will regularly go wrong – because all technological programming regularly goes wrong. Look at the place where robots are used most frequently today: factories. Some 4 percent of US factories have “major robotics accidents” every year – a man having molten allunimium poured over him, or a woman picked up and placed on a conveyor belt to be smashed into the shape of a car. The former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was nearly killed a few years ago after a robot attacked him on a tour of a factory. And remember: these are robots that aren’t designed to kill.

On its first public outing in 2007, one of South Africa’s first warbots went haywire  and began firing explosive shells all around it at the rate of 550 a minute. Nine soldiers died. Think about how maddening it is to deal with a robot on the telephone when you want to pay your phone bill. Now imagine that robot had a machine gun pointed at your chest.

Robots find it almost impossible to distinguish an apple from a tomato: how will they distinguish a combatant from a civilian? You can’t appeal to a robot for mercy; you can’t activate its empathy. And afterwards, who do you punish? Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch says: “War crimes need a violation and an intent. A machine has no capacity to want to kill civilians … If they are incapable of intent, are they incapable of war crimes?”

Robots do make war much easier – for the aggressor. You are taking much less physical risk with your people, even as you kill more of theirs. One US report recently claimed they will turn war into “an essentially frictionless engineering exercise.” As Larry Korb, Ronald Reagan’s assistant secretary of defence: “It will make people think, ‘Gee, warfare is easy.’

If virtually no American forces had died in Vietnam, would the war have stopped when it did – or would the systematic slaughter of the Vietnamese people have continued for many more years? If we weren’t losing anyone in Afghanistan or Iraq, would the call for an end to the killing be as loud? I’d like to think we are motivated primarily by compassion for civilians on the other side, but I doubt it. Take “us” out of the picture and we will be more willing to kill “them.”

There is some evidence that warbots will also make us less inhibited in our killing. When another human being is standing in front of you, when you can stare into their eyes, it’s hard to kill them. When they are half the world away and little more than an avatar, it’s easy. A young air force lieutenant who fought through a warbot told Singer: “It’s like a video game [with] the ability to kill. It’s like… freaking cool.”

When the US First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq was asked in 2006 what kind of robotic support it needed, they said they have an “urgent operational need” for a laser mounted onto an unmanned drone that can cause “instantaneous burst-combustion of insurgent clothing, a rapid death through violent trauma, and more probably a morbid combination of both.” The request said it should be like “long range blow torches or precision flame throwers.” They wanted to do with robots things they would find almost unthinkable face-to-face.

While “we” will lose fewer people at first by fighting with warbots, this way of fighting may well catalyze greater attacks on us in the long run. US army staff sergeant Scott Smith boasts they create “an almost helpless feeling… It’s total shock and awe.” But while terror makes some people shut up, it makes many more furious and determined to strike back. Imagine if the skies over Washington and Manhattan were filled with robots controlled from Torah Borah, or Beijing, and could shoot us at any time. Some would scuttle away – and many would be determined to kill “their” people in revenge. The Lebanese editor Rami Khouri says that when Lebanon was bombarded by largely unmanned Israeli drones in 2006, it only “enhanced the spirit of defiance” and made more people back Hezbollah.

Is this a rational way to harness our genius for science and spend tens of billions of pounds? The scientists who were essential to developing the nuclear bomb – including Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and Andrei Sakharov – turned on their own creations in horror and begged for them to be outlawed. Some distinguished robotics scientists, like Illah Nourbakhsh, are getting in early, and saying the development of autonomous military robots should be outlawed now.

There are some technologies so abhorrent to human beings that we forbid them outright. We have banned war-lasers that permanently blind people along with poison gas. The conveyor belt dragging us ever closer to a world of robot wars can be stopped – if we choose to. All this money and all this effort can be directed towards saving life, not ever-madder ways of taking it. But we have to decide to do it. We have to make the choice to look the warbot in the eye and say, firmly and forever, “Hasta la vista, baby.”

This article appeared in the Independent

I hereby renounce my republicanism – on the condition that Stephanie Beacham is immediately crowned Queen of England. Two weeks ago, the honey-voiced grande dame of Dynasty wafted into the Celebrity Big Brother house alongside a babbling gaggle of non-entities. She had nothing with her but an I'm-being-paid-lots-for-this Zen and an expensive handbag. But she has proceeded to show something that is almost never allowed on to television, or into any British workplace: a 61-year-old woman who is cleverer and wiser and more confident than anyone around her, freely expressing her complex emotions and longings and lusts. If we peer into the surprising story of Stephanie, we can see one of the great scandals of Britain today: the premature consigning of my mother's generation of women to atrophy and decline.

The Big Brother house is the graveyard of dignity. It is a place where every burp is recorded and replayed, and rows about a burnt chicken cause an international race row. It reduces everyone inside it to pettiness and tribalism and shrieks. Yet Beacham has an inherent poise that no amount of fish guts sprayed into her face while she is strapped to a roundabout (yes, they did) can dent. While the other "celebrities" neurotically fret about their status, she is the one who does the work, annihilates the fundamentalist political ravings of Stephen Baldwin, and makes languid but piercing observations about what is really going on. She gets the hot young men to massage her feet – "Darling, you can never be too hard" – and when they are given absurd tasks asks Ivana Trump with a chuckle: "Are we whores, or fools?"

Against a chorus of self-pity from the rest, she says simply: "This is the best holiday I've had in years ... I feel lighter [and] happier to just be me than I have in years. I could fuss around and try to make my hair and my face look better but [I choose] the pleasure of giving in, of just being."

This is the wisdom of so many sixtysomething women. It comes from a lifetime of seeing hopes fulfilled and dashed; from decades of being scarred and seeing the scar tissue heal, getting crinklier and richer every time. Yet we are a country that, today, is systematically writing off these women – in a way that is bad for all of us, whatever our age.

At the same time as the nation was falling for Beacham – she is favourite to win – Harriet Harman was giving an important speech about their generation. Today, when a woman turns 60, or a man turns 65, she is told her life's work is over, and to go home. Whatever expertise she has built up – my mother worked with victims of domestic violence for decades, for example, until last year – is dismissed. Retire. The end.

Millions of people don't want to live like this. While only 11 per cent of people work beyond retirement age, a recent opinion poll for Saga found that 38 per cent had wanted to carry on. The sacking of Arlene Phillips from Strictly Come Dancing – for a younger, dumber model – resonated because it happens in workplaces across the country. It hits both sexes, but women especially strictly: Brucie is still tap-dancing in his eighties, while Arlene is dismissed as a dried-out husk 20 years sooner.

Harman – another woman who has taken a kicking in her life, and only emerged more dignified and poised – says we need a more "mature" and flexible way of thinking about retirement. It should be about empowering people to live their lives, their way – not blocking them off in their prime, against their will.

It's essential to preserve the right to retire. My grandmother worked tough manual jobs, including scrubbing toilets, all her life; by the time she got to 60, her knees were ruined and she couldn't go on. That's why the Conservative proposals to rapidly jack up the retirement age, by millionaires who have never done a day's manual work in their life, are cruel. But it's equally absurd to say a woman like Beacham, or my mother, or Harman herself, is past it, has nothing more to give, and should be consigned to living life in her living room. This isn't just bad for them: it's bad for all of us, because it wastes great swathes of the country's talent.

So Harman has proposed a more open form of retirement. Today, it's a crash landing: you go from 9 to 5 to a P45 in one sudden fall. In Harman's vision, people could glide towards retirement more gradually. At 60 or 65, you would have the right (but not an obligation) to continue part-time. It's good for you, because you remain within the social network and stimulation of work, and you don't suddenly find yourself at a loss. It's good for your employer, because the knowledge you have built up continues to fertilise the company. It's good for the country, because we won't have so many clever, able people twiddling their thumbs. We are going to need their labour, too. In Britain today, there is a growing pool of older people, and a diminishing stream of younger people. In 20 years' time, half the population of Britain will be over 50. For the millions who want to work, it's crazy to block them off, and push them into dependency on a diminishing pool of the young.

Today, these are only suggestions being put up for discussion, and the current government clearly won't live long enough to implement them. But Harman has a long track record of pushing ideas that are derided at the time, and later become accepted as common sense: back in the early 1980s, she was derided for saying the Government should have a national childcare strategy and must require companies to allow parents to request flexi-time. It's a familiar pattern by now. They hurl sexist insults and call her mad, then 10 years later say that of course they support those feminist ideas – just not the mad ones pushed by Harriet Harman.

When women in their sixties are finally shown to us in all their richness, people respond: look at the glorious renaissance of Meryl Streep in the past few years. But too often they are bundled away, out of the workplace, off the TV screen, dismissed as too wrinkled to sit alongside a wrinklier man in his seventies. They are assumed to steadily lose the characteristics of human beings, like (for one) sexuality. Fellow housemates Dane Bowers and Cisco admitted Stephanie Beacham was "the fittest woman" in there, and they were startled to discover they could fancy a woman her age. We live in an airbrushed culture where 60 is always presented as sterile. It's a nasty trajectory: first jobless, then sexless, and finally characterless.

This is part of the reason that when it comes to people who are older still – the swelling army of eightysomethings and beyond – we avert our gaze. We skim over the headlines revealing that nursing homes are forcing elderly people to have unnecessary operations jabbing tubes into their stomachs because it's "a hassle" to clean them up. We don't want to know that hundreds of thousands of them are being given "chemical coshes" – anti-psychotic drugs that reduce them to drooling zombies. The dehumanisation begins at 60 and is complete by 80.

It doesn't have to be like this – but it requires a change in the culture and a change in the law. Arise, Queen Stephanie: your sixtysomething subjects await a better Kingdom.

You can find details here. I'll be on a panel with Ken Livingstone and Harriet Harman discussing how to beat the right in 2010.

It is not only David Cameron's glossy, tie-less election poster that has been airbrushed. The ugly spots and oily patches in the Tory leader's policies have also been successfully pixellated out of the public mind – by a Prime Minister with the communications skills of a malfunctioning speak-your-weight machine, by a Labour Party engaged in self-strangulation, and by a malfunctioning media pitched at the intellectual level of the Mr Men books. So nobody sees Cameron's policies; nobody knows. Most of us will only discover them after he has won, when we will wonder why nobody told us this was coming.

For example, a perfect laboratory experiment in Cameronomics has been taking place just next door, in Ireland – but who knows about it? One of the remaining real differences between Labour and the Conservatives is over how governments should behave in a recession. At first glance, David Cameron's proposal sounds like common sense. When times are bad, you – as an individual, or a family – figure out how to cut your spending and pay down your debts. No more fancy nights out. Holiday at home. Put the stuff you don't want on eBay.

Cameron says government should do the same: it should slash its debts, even if that means dramatically slashing spending. This was the view of economics that prevailed until the Great Depression – and it has only just made a comeback.

Gordon Brown has a different view. It has underpinned his economic decisions since the Great Crash of 2008 – but unfortunately, he is such an atrocious communicator that I will have to quote somebody else to explain it. Barack Obama says: "Economists on both the left and right agree that the last thing a government should do in the middle of a recession is to cut back on spending. You see, when this recession began, many families sat around their kitchen table and tried to figure out where they could cut back. That is a completely responsible and understandable reaction. But if every family in America cuts back, then no one is spending any money, which means there are more layoffs, and the economy gets even worse. That's why the government has to step in and temporarily boost spending in order to stimulate demand." You keep stimulating until we are back on our feet – and then you pay back the debt in the good times.

This is, when you first hear it, counter-intuitive. It means governments have to decide to spend more when we as individuals are deciding to spend less. It can seem hard for those of us who are not economists to figure out which of these views is right. Sure, we can listen to people like the Nobel Prize winner for Economics Paul Krugman, who told me he was "shocked" by Cameron's policies and they would worsen the recession "for sure". We can see that the Great Depression got much worse when governments took the Cameron route, and was ended by a giant programme of debt-funded government spending. But the best guide is to look at countries that are trying the Cameron approach and countries that are trying the opposite tactics now, and check the results.

Throughout the nineties and the noughties, Ireland was held up as a poster child by the right. People like John Redwood and (yes) David Cameron said its model of low taxes and almost-total deregulation showed the way forward for Britain. In fact it produced the most corrupt and over-extended banking sector outside Iceland. Just one bank – Anglo Irish – is now on course to receive a €30bn extended bailout, equivalent to every penny of tax collected in the country in 2009. The Celtic Tiger had its claws ripped out, and it's shaking at the back of its cage.

But the Irish government has continued to cleave to Tory solutions. After the crash, its government rejected the case for a stimulus package, and insisted its "number one priority" was to "cut the deficit and get the public finances back in order". It sawed deep into spending on teachers, pupils, the disabled, and childcare. Out of total annual spending of €60bn, they are en route to ditching €15bn. The government is paying off its debt as its first, second and third priority, just as Cameron demands.

So what happened? The economy has collapsed. As the economist Rob Brown writes in the latest issue of the New Statesman, the country is now embarked on "an astonishing 15 per cent shrinkage in the Irish economy overall – the sharpest contraction experienced by any advanced industrial nation in peacetime". Unemployment has soared to 12.5 per cent: it would be even higher if so many young people hadn't left the country. Only 14 per cent of Irish citizens are happy with the government's performance.

By contrast, the countries that have most strongly defied Cameronomics are pulling out of the recession first and fastest. China has ramped up state spending to 88 percent of GDP growth, paid for by increased government debt. This is Brown to the power of a hundred. If Cameron was right, this would be economic suicide, and they would be plummeting down. In fact, the recession there is now over. That's why even right-wing leaders that initially shared Cameron's instincts, like Angela Merkel, are reversing course.

Obviously, this is a crucial debate that will alter your life and mine – but have you heard it plainly expressed anywhere? Cameron states his incorrect case with his usual suave charm, while Labour isn't even putting their correct case at all. Incredibly, there has clearly been a decision by the Government that explaining the case for Keynesianism is too complicated, so they won't even try. When they are challenged about the deficit, they should reply: "Yes, we absolutely have increased the deficit. That is what you should do in a recession. And we will keep on increasing the deficit and stimulating the economy until this nightmare is over. Look at Ireland. Is that what you want?" (If they were smarter still, they'd use the stimulus money on launching Britain on a massive, labour-intensive transition to renewable energy sources, solving two crises at once.)

Instead, Labour offers a mumbled, evasive pledge that they too will cut the deficit, just a bit later. Without hearing the case for Keynesianism, this just sounds like incompetence or evasiveness. They have set themselves an artificial target of cutting it by half in the next four years. This throws away their best argument – and the theory that has guided their response to the recession from the start. If the global economy gets worse, we will need a lot more stimulus, funded by borrowing, to stave off terrible pain.

The idea that we can't do this because we have maxed-out the national credit card is simply false. For almost the entire time since the 1750s, Britain's national debt – now at 80 per cent of GDP – has been as high or higher than today. Japan's is currently 198 per cent, and they have no problem getting international loans at reasonable rates.

Why won't Labour say so? Why make it seem like Cameron is on to something, when he is so wrong? Brown seems to think that matching the Tory language in this way cleverly "neutralises" their argument. It doesn't. It makes it seem like they were right all along.

There are too many people's lives at stake to continue with this empty fact-free conversation. Labour's policies have been bitterly disappointing – but David Cameron's set us up for economic disaster. When will we start to say so?