Forget the Fairness Doctrine, can some state apparatchik please put a ban on the phrase “We are All Socialists Now”?

Since the banking crisis began last year, that exact sentence has been employed with absurd regularity. Just type it into Google and have a look. Newsweek has said it; Simon Heffer has said it; almost every blogger in the universe seems to have said it. Cathy Young’s column today asks: “Are we all socialists now?” Time went one better by declaring: “We Are All Keynesians.”

The words “We are all socialists now” are meant to sound ominous and important; as though the author, with supreme insight, has spied the silent triumph of statism.

The trouble, though, is that people have been saying those exact words for over a 100 years, which rather undermines the portentous urgency of “now”.

The remark is attributed in the first instance to Sir William Harcourt (1827-1904). Harcourt was twice Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, in 1886, and again from 1892-95. He possibly – I haven’t been able to verify it — first said “We are all socialists now” as he introduced his 1894 death duty.

His words seem to have been adapted — consciously or not — by Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, who said, in a speech at Mansion House in Nov 1895, “We’re all Socialists now-a-days.”

So we seem to have been socialists for at least 115 years. Isn’t it rather boring to be still pointing that out?

UPDATE: I can’t find the first use of “We are all Socialists Now” in the context of the United States. Yet even taking into account America’s preference for a mildly less centrist form of social democracy, we could certainly do with a more original expression for saying what’s happening.