Bill Jamieson: No more soundbites – this economic mess needs some big ideas

ON ALMOST every front, there is a palpable sense that an era in modern politics has come to an end. I do not just mean the helpless coda of the Gordon Brown premiership, but that longer era, the ten-year arch that has never been tested by economic setback, still less one so severe as the period we have entered.

The sense of an economy that has plunged as if off a cliff grows by the day. And the cascading wreckage of illusions will bury the era of soundbite politics, that tinny recitation of vacuous new "initiatives" proclaimed on Monday and forgotten by Wed...