When the banks stand exposed as having rigged everyone's interest rates for years and years. (Interestingly, even Sir George Mathewson told the Today programme this morning that retail banking and investment banking ought to be split entirely, something that certain over-eager, historically illiterate types have repeatedly tried to tell me on here would be impossible even though, as they have been quite incapable of understanding, building societies are organised like that by law. Look it up. While you are at it, look up Glass-Steagall. And have a word with Sir George Mathewson.)
When the pursuit of the economic policies that Tony Blair and David Miliband could never get past Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls has today resulted in a recession even deeper than expected, and in more NEETs than ever before.
When PFI has brought hospitals to the brink of bankruptcy.
When PFI has brought hospitals to the brink of bankruptcy.
When the currency that Blair tried, and mercifully failed, to bully Brown into accepting for the United Kingdom continues to collapse into economic chaos, leading to the ever-more-real overthrow of democracy.
When even the Daily Telegraph has to admit that people in Britain are more likely to be killed by the sting of a bee or a wasp than by a terrorist attack.
When News International has announced that it intends to split in exactly the way that gives the lie to all the claims that the schemes promoted here and elsewhere for breaking up media empires were as impractical as, well, those for breaking up retail banking and investment banking.
When Radovan Karadzic has already been acquitted of one charge of genocide, virtually an unheard of verdict on the part of bodies such as the one to which he is subject, opening up the space to reconsider the whole of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s and the whole of the policy of liberal intervention.
When exactly the sort of Labour Party against which Blair defined his project is racing ahead in the polls while comfortably winning council seats in wards that he never even condescended to contest.
Bring back Blair? Oh, yes. And then have great fun working out what to do with him...
Yes.....the Banks.
ReplyDeleteAs a youngish married man with one child circa 1984, I thought the best way to deal with a Hire Purchase debt was to go to our friendly bank manager and get a loan at a better rate. Straight forward surely. It suited my young family. Business for the Bank.
I made my case to our Bank Manager who listened aghast and looked at me as if I wanted the loan to open a lap dancing establishment.
He closed my file. And told me that this was unethical. A bank would never take another banks loans.
Oddly because I am lazy...I never changed my bank. Still there after 34 years as an individual and almost 30 as a joint account.
Of course for much of our married life we have been bombarded with all kindsa junk mails from "banks" (often previously mutual societies) offering us all manner of consolodation and transfer....which have gone in the re-cycle bin.
But it strikes me that my anger and hostility to my bank manager..long retired..was in fact mis-placed. He had something called "ethics".
Now of course there is no such thing as ethics anywhere....although I might headline my own blog on banks and trust as "The Only Way Is Ethics"
FJH