Well, the BBC seems to have set the best and most decent example for an active state. Failure = job loss. Not a bad example for the finance sector as a whole and for No 10 and No 11 Downing Street to follow.

And Trevor Philips has made a sensible contribution on the exercise of state power to correct the problems of inequality as it affects the most significant and most disadvantaged ethnic group by any measure, composing the current and future underclass, the children and grandchildren of the white once-working class whose defensive organisations were broken as their jobs were stripped off them in the Thatcher/Major Locust years, a policy of enforced deprivation which has continued without respite throughput the New Labour New Locust years, which hasn't been picked up in any way shape and form by Compass and its contributors over the last two days.

But they can get ever so grumpy over anyone who has the temerity to criticise Compass's policy of encouraging the dissemination of its own PR puffery on its otherwise serious website.

A useful debate... but "time for what kind of active state"? And what kind of economy? A reconsideration of the notions of "a republican polity" and a "political economy of citizenship" would be useful. In our present predicament this would form the basis of a new social and democratic "ideology". This would expose the pernicious and perverted proposition that the "unencumbered firm" is an aspect of "freedom" and would advance the notion of "democratic autonomy" - stressing the need for responsible and accountable productive organizations. Then we would need to consider the political communities to which accountability was required...

But, above all, the crisis provides the opportunity / raises the necessity for alternative ideologies attractive to the public...