For someone labelled “the most dangerous man in Europe”, Alexis Tsipras was unusually charming to listeners during his appearance at a sold-out event mid-March at the London School of Economics. His aim was to place the radical left-wing movement Syriza, which he leads, in a more reassuring context. After all, he told the audience, outrage at inequality was what motivated two of the LSE’s founders, Beatrice and Sidney Webb (who also co-founded the New Statesman). The “casino capitalism” that precipitated the financial crash of 2008 was not just a problem for the poor; hadn’t the NS’s Peter Wilby, he said, argued in a 2007 column that inequality was “a middle-class issue”, too?
The following night, Tsipras repeated his lecture at the venerable left-wing venue Friends House, this time shifting the emphasis to appeal to a friendlier crowd: more rhetorical attacks on “oligarchs” but carrying the same basic message. For Europe’s elite, the debt and the deficit were never the targets of the austerity programme; rather, the goal was to reduce wages, shrink the welfare state and make the labour market more flexible – “a class-based attack”.
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