Britannia Radio

This is a picture of the man who is ruining our country  and is so 
besotted in his own self-regard and vanity that he is unable to admit 
even to himself that he might just possibly be wrong.

Every day that he remains in No:10 is another step to the collapse of 
Britain.   I don't think that the Tories have all the answers but 
they would - I believe - make an honest attempt to make a fresh 
start.  We need an election now!

and BTW  - while writing about 'honesty',  I was glad to see that 
Cameron refused to back a sordid deal with Brown to keep MPs ' 
expenses secret.    THAT's one thing the Tories have actually DONE 
even if some Tory MPs were none-too-please, !
xxxxxxxxxx cs
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TELEGRAPH   24.1.09
Capitalists and Socialists paying a high price for their devil's bargain
Gordon Brown's policy is collapsing under the weight of its own 
contradictions

The Prime Minister must know that nationalisation of the banks would 
be a nightmare, and yet this outcome seems increasingly likely, says 
Charles Moore.

By Charles Moore

Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of RBS, and Gordon 
Brown, our Prime Minister, are both brilliant, loner Scots, regarded 
by those who work with them as "control freaks". Both were tremendous 
hits in their jobs, once. For many years, both believed that they had 
successfully suspended the laws of financial gravity, and they 
persuaded others to believe them. Both presided over massive 
expansion of their respective organisations.

Both then overreached. RBS this week posted the biggest loss in 
British corporate history. Mr Brown is heading the British Government 
towards the biggest budget deficit since the Second World War, and 
yesterday, officially, took us into recession.

What is the difference between Sir Fred and Mr Brown? Mr Brown is 
still in his job.

There are, as has often been pointed out, deep, global, systemic and 
technical reasons for the crisis we are in, but when one tries to 
analyse how this country is dealing with them, one cannot ignore the 
human factor. Who are dealing with it, where are they "coming from" 
and where on earth are they going?

When you think about this, it becomes easier to understand why this 
week's enormous rescue plan, which contained reasonable ideas such as 
government insurance of the banks' toxic assets, has brought, in the 
short term, greater panic.

In this drama, all the institutions and most of the senior 
individuals involved, are compromised. Even the most admirable are 
vulnerable. The intelligent and honourable Mervyn King, the Governor 
of the Bank of England, is believed by the bankers to have failed to 
help the interbank lending market in 2007. That failure, they say, 
ensured the collapse of Northern Rock, and precipitated everything else.

Even those bankers, such as the equally intelligent and decent John 
Varley of Barclays, who have so far kept their companies out of the 
hands of government, are not believed in the markets. They are 
accused of misvaluing their assets and concealing their liabilities. 
This week, the market put a valuation on Barclays which was much the 
same as its latest profits. By any normal calculation, you would 
think that Barclays shares are insanely cheap.

But you dare not make that calculation. Everyone is thinking too much 
about the game that everyone else is playing to be able to be 
rational. People are fighting to justify their past actions, to stay 
in their jobs, or looking for ways out or for others to blame.

There is supposed to be a "tripartite" system for managing our 
difficulties - the Bank, the Financial Services Authority and the 
Treasury - but those who have to work the system tell me that they 
cannot locate authority in it. They have what they think are rational 
conversations with Alistair Darling, the Chancellor. But they notice 
that Number 10 seems to do something different, without the 
Chancellor necessarily knowing. It is not easy to present these 
complicated rescues to the world if you have been kept in the dark 
until 24 hours before lift-off.   [Darling was apparently not told 
that the ban on ''short' share dealing had been lifted, and went 
catatonic -cs]

And they find themselves assailed by Baroness Vadera, a junior 
minister at what, with tragic pathos, was last year renamed the 
Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. It is she 
who carries the messages in and out of the Brown bunker. [The woman 
is by all accounts a lurking menace -cs] The Treasury which, for all 
its faults, tends to try to convey uncomfortable financial truths to 
prime ministers in difficult times, is often cut out by Number?10.

No one is more conflicted in the crisis than the Prime Minister 
himself. You can feel him longing to attack bankers - both because 
everyone hates them at present and because of how Labour politics 
works. But he knows that the now-excoriated Sir Fred was once his 
close associate. Mr Brown boasted last autumn that it was his quiet 
word with his friend Sir Victor Blank, that persuaded Sir Victor's 
company, Lloyds, to hurry up and take over HBOS - a move which seems 
to have turned both banks into the living dead.

The other day, he had an assortment of big shots to lunch at 
Chequers. One of them, Mervyn Davies, another big banker (Standard 
Chartered), came away with a peerage and a ministerial post.

An enterprising reporter should work through all the years of 
Labour's intimate relations with the bankers - the party links, the 
titles, the holidays and dinners, the putting them on boring prime 
ministerial commissions about "vulnerable employment" or innovation, 
the questions not asked, the favours granted.
If I were a socialist, I would be upset by the collusion between 
capitalists and the Labour Government. As a free-marketeer, I am 
horrified. You can make ever more money, was Brown's devil's bargain, 
so long as I can take ever more of it. Socialists and free marketers 
alike should cry: "What about the workers?"

This week, another of Mr Brown's crony capitalists popped up in the 
papers. He is Paul Myners. He is an ex-director of NatWest, ex-
chairman of the Low Pay Commission - not a case of "Le patron mange 
ici" - and of Marks and Spencer and of The Guardian.

Last year, Mr Brown made him Lord Myners and Financial Services 
Secretary. Lord Myners has been sent on a mission to explain to 
frightened markets that the Government is not trying to nationalise 
the banks. It wants "a return to an effective commercial banking 
sector", he wrote.
And probably, in some sense, that is true. Even with his abiding 
faith in the beneficence of government and of himself, Mr Brown must 
know that nationalisation of the banks would be a nightmare. Either 
it would require compensation (£125 billion on the latest book value 
of the banks concerned), which would cause taxpayer outrage, or 
expropriation, which might make markets lose all faith in this 
Government. He must realise that he would have to adjudicate, 
impossibly, between the needs of banks to restore order in their 
balance sheets and "national needs" such as lending to small 
businesses, or, more basely, pouring money into marginal 
constituencies. He would need legislation, and he would face court 
cases (as is going on in relation to Northern Rock). There would be 
endless rows with other banks and the European Commission and the 
World Trade Organisation about competition. He would collapse 
overseas bank business and undermine a once-huge tax base.

But it may be that the banks are so flattened by their folly and by 
his, that Mr Brown is nationalising them whether he consciously 
wishes to or not. The markets certainly think so.

Mr Brown's intentions are, anyway, beside the point. His policy is, 
as Marxists put it, collapsing under the weight of its own 
contradictions, with the rest of us buried in the rubble.