It's the end of an era. Things will never be the same again. The age of neoliberalism is dead. How many times have we heard those pat phrases these past 18 months or so as what started as a little local difficulty in the US housing market developed into the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There are certainly good reasons for the left to believe that the tide has at last turned after three decades in which the right has been in the ascendancy. As Paul Mason illustrates in this excellent account of the humbling of the former masters of the universe, the crash was the consequence of 'giant hubris and the untrammelled power of a financial elite'.

The events of 2007-09 have been big finance’s equivalent of the British labour movement's 'winter of discontent' 30 years previously. Public disgust at the excesses and incompetence of the bankers has meant there has rarely been a better time for a radical shift leftwards in politics. But it is one thing saying the conditions are ripe for change, another thing altogether bringing that change about.

Think about it for a second. Ever since the crisis began, the prime aim of governments – most notably Gordon Brown’s – has been to put the genie back in the bottle. There is nothing the prime minister would like more than to return to life as it was in June 2007, when, on the eve of moving into 10 Downing Street, he used his Mansion House speech to praise the 'ingenuity and creativity' of the City, contrasting Britain's light-touch regulation with the heavy-handed approach favoured by the Americans.

As a result, the government went to extraordinary lengths to avoid nationalising Northern Rock and has taken other parts of the financial sector into part or full state ownership only with extreme reluctance. It is even ploughing on with the deeply unpopular part-privatisation of the Royal Mail.