Right-wing plaudits for more government intervention

Politicalbetting's excellent 'Gord wins the headline war' montage of today's Mail, Express, Telegraph and Times front-pages surely suggests that this 11 year old government has today had its best headlines from that particular group of newspapers since May 1st 1997.

Now, some of us are rather wary of government chasing good populist headlines in the right-wing press. But not these headlines.

Here, we see the right-wing press cheering because the Labour government does not think it is right to let markets run their course.

And these demonstrate what should be one of the central political messages of the new politics of the downturn. The idea of government playing a greater role is often thought and said to be unpopular. The reality of government acting to protect people against risks on an issue that affects people's lives is often very popular indeed.

That is why very few people really support the libertarian idea of a much smaller state - including many of those on the right who sometimes think that they do.