Labour's wretched lack of backbone over banks
Great article by Nick Cohen of the Guardian:
Pretty much says it like it is, the banks have been allowed to get away with murder in the UK, at tax payer expense. Are they really needed anymore? Or should they be allowed to slope off elsewhere and cause havoc!
"Democracy's advantage over other systems of government is meant to be that electorates can throw out incompetent leaders who do not respond to changing times. Knowing this, governments realise that they cannot let abuses of power continue. They must reform or perish.
Since the crash of 2008, British democracy has failed. Most of the political class and a large section of the public responded to a shock as great as the 9/11 attacks by carrying on as if nothing had happened. The effort to pretend that we can return to where we once were has been huge. But the strains of keeping up appearances are starting to show. Ideologies that once seemed dominant are now looking threadbare and ridiculous.
Bankers forced the taxpayer to bail them out with public money: a policy that free-market liberals denounced as a sin when coalminers, steelworkers and car workers asked for public assistance for their "lame-duck" industries in the 1980s. Yet those same supporters of markets remain unconcerned about a diversion of public funds on a far larger scale to lame-duck banks, and do not protest when bankers pocket the proceeds as rewards for failure beyond the imagination of the metal-bashing workers of the 1980s."
See the rest below.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/11/nick-cohen-labour-banking-reform
Pretty much says it like it is, the banks have been allowed to get away with murder in the UK, at tax payer expense. Are they really needed anymore? Or should they be allowed to slope off elsewhere and cause havoc!
"Democracy's advantage over other systems of government is meant to be that electorates can throw out incompetent leaders who do not respond to changing times. Knowing this, governments realise that they cannot let abuses of power continue. They must reform or perish.
Since the crash of 2008, British democracy has failed. Most of the political class and a large section of the public responded to a shock as great as the 9/11 attacks by carrying on as if nothing had happened. The effort to pretend that we can return to where we once were has been huge. But the strains of keeping up appearances are starting to show. Ideologies that once seemed dominant are now looking threadbare and ridiculous.
Bankers forced the taxpayer to bail them out with public money: a policy that free-market liberals denounced as a sin when coalminers, steelworkers and car workers asked for public assistance for their "lame-duck" industries in the 1980s. Yet those same supporters of markets remain unconcerned about a diversion of public funds on a far larger scale to lame-duck banks, and do not protest when bankers pocket the proceeds as rewards for failure beyond the imagination of the metal-bashing workers of the 1980s."
See the rest below.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/11/nick-cohen-labour-banking-reform
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