I am not going to repeat the infantile leftish line that there was no difference between New Labour and the old Conservatives. No right-winger I know believes they have lived through 13 years of quasi-Conservative government. But the imperative to get the Tories out and keep them out came to mean accepting a raging free-market in high finance. Not reluctantly, as a regrettable political necessity, but in the cases of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, at least, joyously and with the fervour of an Ayn Rand cultist. Labour's vast public works programmes and attempts to redistribute wealth were built on the belief that untamed, unregulated speculation would provide the wealth to fund social democracy. When the speculation collapsed, so did the longest period of centre-Left rule in British history. Labour's gamble on the financial markets will surely strike historians as the strangest aberration of our times. Centre-Left governments make predictable economic mistakes. They tend to overspend, overtax and overregulate, as this one has, most egregiously by overtaxing the working poor. But the electorate should be able to rely on the Left to regulate the banking system and retain an instinctive suspicion of speculators.

Labour was not operating in a vacuum. Ordinary people may not have liked what they saw on Wall Street and in the City but the boom seemed to validate it and there were no popular protests. Nor were artists telling the government that the lesson of financial history was that speculative excess always leads to bust and that the fortunes earned by the winners would have to be paid for by ordinary taxpayers. The most glaring absence of the past decade has been any representation in either serious or popular drama of the maniacally unstable source of so much of Britain's prosperity. The City was one of the financial centres of the world — the leading financial centre according to its boosters. The lusts, animal spirits, jealousies, gambles and crimes of Darwinian capitalism ought to have been gifts for authors in search of subjects and commissioning editors in search of serials. Not one was tempted. Like a family with a dirty secret, the British chose not to discuss the source of their illusory good fortune. It is as if, when Manchester rose to become the world's first manufacturing city in the 19th century, Charles Dickens, Frederick Engels and Elizabeth Gaskell had shrugged and turned away from the racket of the new machines and declared that the factory system and the slums were not worth writing about.

The most honest play of this year is Sir David Hare's The Power of Yes. Instead of presenting himself as an omniscient author, he appears on stage as a confused journalist trying to find out how a financial system Britain took for granted had imploded. How did we tie our fortunes to the policies of Alan Greenspan and Gordon Brown and the schemes of Sir Fred Goodwin and Adam Applegarth? Hare's humility ought to draw a line under the political struggle that began in the 1980s. It turns out that none of the clichés were true. The Left did not win the culture war, for a left-wing culture that cannot see what is going on in front of its nose is decayed, not victorious. Meanwhile, the Right's boast that it won the economic war was as much a victim of the crash as the broken banks. Perhaps Britain would do better in future if its culture was more conservative and its economic policies more radical. A reversal in priorities could hardly create a worse mess than the one we have now.

As we acquire South American levels of debt to pay for the folly of the old order, the novels inspired by Thatcherism are worth digging out. Even if you disagree with them and find their pessimism and occasional superciliousness unnerving, they at least come from a time which thought it worth arguing against the status quo.