End of the Laissez-Faire Era?

The Guardian's Larry Elliott seems to think so although, as Tristram Hunt points out in the same paper, perhaps we shouldn't expect too much by way of a backlash. Meanwhile, Meghnad Desai argues for a dose of Thatcherism to be applied to Wall Street and the City of London in the same way it was once applied to the coal pits of Yorkshire. Oh, what delicious irony that would have represented had the Bush administration not just bailed out the bankers with US taxpayers' cash (which, of course, is pretty ironic in and of itself)!