Laughalong With Laughland.

It isn't just the left that are using the credit crunch to promote policies that would wreck our economy, in the Daily Mail John Laughland (better known as an apologist for Slobodan Milosevic) demands that the Conservatives abandon free trade:

Of all the lessons to be learned from the meltdown of the world's financial system - a catastrophe that will impoverish every household in Britain - none is more urgent than that the Conservative Party should abandon the ideology that got us into this mess in the first place.

I refer to the now discredited doctrine of free trade, which has been the Tories' central belief for three decades. It was only later adopted by Labour under Tony Blair - but it is now doing so much damage that it is time to get rid of it.

As he says, free trade has been British policy for 30 years now, yet who would seriously deny that the UK's economy has been far more successful in the last 30 years than in the previous 30?

He doesn't actually explain in what sense free trade has been discredited, other than the fact he opposes it. I'm guessing his reasoning is we practice free trade, we have a financial crisis, therefore the financial crisis must be caused by free trade, even though I can't think of an explanation of how this occurs. After all North Korea doesn't have a credit crunch do they?