In the West, the rich metropolitan elites came up with a great wheeze to make more money and establish new markets – globalisation. Everyone would benefit from the economic activity, so they said (especially ME).

In the pursuit of profits, jobs were moved around the world to where labour was cheap and environmental standards were lax, pollution was exported to the developing world, which duly began to aspire to the Western model.

In the West itself the old working and middle classes were gradually thinned out as jobs moved away.

The financial classes were responsible for their system running into the buffers in the crash of 2007/8. Who paid the price? Not the financial class, but those very same people, who were hit hard by ongoing ‘austerity’ programmes.

Eventually the resulting discontents built up, exploding in voters moving against established parties across the Western democracies. Brexit, Trump, Le Pen,…

They voted for change. What happened of course was that the elite morphed into the supposed solution, peddling simplistic populist messages – about taking back control, making things great again, strong leadership,…

Le plus ça change, le plus c’est la même chose!