Ten years after the crash, there's barely suppressed civil war in Britain

...

The banks got bailed out. Their bosses still get paid out. The rest of us get austerity. Whatever technical reforms have followed on from the crash, the economic and business model that created it remains intact. We could have used the nationalised banks to direct credit to strategic industries and regions; instead, Labour and the Tories insisted on treating them as if they were still private sector industries. We could have used the crash to make Britain a far more equal and democratic society. Instead, the UK is still grossly unequal.

And so we remain reliant on debt -- aptly termed "the raw material for bubbles and crashes" by Daniel Mügge at the University of Amsterdam. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the UK is far deeper in the red now than it was when Northern Rock collapsed. Government debt has shot up under the Conservatives, but so too has household borrowing. Were the UK to crash again, its government no longer has the political capital nor the fiscal headroom to save the financial system. And with interest rates scraping along the bottom, the Bank of England has barely any firepower left. Ten years of political fudge and failed austerity has left Britain's state machinery tapped out.