‘Daily Express’:
“LABOUR UNDER SPOTLIGHT AS BARCLAYS CLAIMS ‘BANK OF ENGLAND TOLD US TO LOWER RATES’ ”
BARCLAYS.
‘Daily Mail’ gives Labour Party an appropriate reference here:
“Revenge of a fallen titan: Ousted Barclays boss makes damning claims Bank of England and Labour ministers were involved in rigging interest rates.”
BBC-NUJ doesn’t:-
“Barclays ex-boss Bob Diamond faces MPs’ questioning”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18695191
My Word Is My Milibond
‘Documents seen by the BBC on Monday indicate ministers in the last Labour government held discussions with banks about policies which would allow the Libor rate to fall.
Speculation about how much the government of the day knew prompted a statement on Tuesday evening from former Labour minister Baroness Vadera of Holland Park.
She said she “has no recollection of speaking to Paul Tucker or anyone else at the Bank of England about the price setting of Libor”.’
Miliband…all fur coat and no knickers?
I listened to Campbell and Derbyshire this morning…and of course the news bulletins….but don’t recall any mention of the fact that the Labour Government may have given Barclays the nod to manipulate the Libor.
I think Peston was onto it on Monday…but a deathly silence seemed to descend upon 5Live at least.
This has the potential to be THE story….Miliband has been scurrying around demanding criminal procedures against Barclays and a full-on inquiry…..if the allegations are true Miliband and Labour should be toast…if only for his denial of truth and attempt to deceive everyone with highly opportunistic political statements.
They may well have mentioned it but the fact that I did not notice would say a lot….that it was downplayed and essentially ignored.
A lack of facts didn’t stop the BBC giving Miliband endless airtime to make his accusations and presumptious demands.
The BBC should now be nailing Miliband to the floor with questions. Maybe Balls suspects the guns are going to be turning on them…I believe he is denying all knowledge..’I was education minister at the time!’
However if so, perhaps he could explain why the exam boards were rigging the education system and destroying a generation’s life chances…to put it in BBC talk.
And why Miliband as Environment minister saddled British industry with a target to cut CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050…a ruinous demand that no other country was stupid enough to implement.
Hopefully tomorrow in PMQs Cameron will wipe the floor with Miliband and the BBC will be forced to open that can of worms.
We will be discovering fiscal turds left by the last Labour government for literally decades to come. Isn't it time for that wretched lot to face a reckoning?
Like an iceberg, the extent of the damage wrought by the last Labour government is still becoming apparent.
One of the wheezes Labour used to camouflage its vast spending spree was the Private Finance Initiative. These had been brought in by John Major’s Conservatives (to criticism from the then Labour opposition) and involved a private sector entity building something and then selling it or leasing back to the government over a number of years, usually decades.
Upon winning the election in 1997 however, Labour performed a volte face and embraced PFIs. They appealed to Gordon Brown because the liabilities taken on under PFIs would not show up on the government’s balance sheet. In other words, they wouldn’t be included in the national debt figure.
Labour signed up to an estimated £229 billion of PFI projects. That’s almost two and a half times the entire projected budget deficit for 2012 – 2013, or 16 percent of GDP.
And all of it was off the books. This enables Labour supporters to argue that “Public sector net debt (as a percentage of GDP) FELL from the start of Labour’s time in government until the beginning of the global financial crisis”. But, if you include the PFI liabilities the Labour government signed us up to, any fiscal improvement during their time in office vanishes and this already thin argument does likewise.
Perhaps Brown was stupid and/or hubristic enough to believe he really had banished “Tory boom and bust”. Perhaps he calculated that he would be long gone before the bills for PFI landed on the mat. Either way, while in the long run Brown is (thankfully) politically dead, we taxpayers are not.
Last week it emerged that six NHS trusts were facing bankruptcy thanks to the PFI deals struck by the Labourgovernment. As the Telegraph reported
“The total value of the NHS buildings built by Labour under the scheme is £11.4bn. But the bill, which will also include fees for maintenance, cleaning and portering, will come to more than £70bn on current projections and will not be paid off until 2049...Some trusts are spending up to a fifth of their budget servicing the mortgages...Across the public sector, taxpayers are committed to paying £229bn for hospitals, schools, roads and other projects with a capital value of £56bn”
Indeed, like the cat who leaves little ‘presents’ around the house for you to discover when you return from holiday, theLabour government of 1997 to 2010 is the gift that keeps on crapping on your carpet. We will be discovering fiscalturds left by Labour for literally decades to come.
If you were being charitable you would ascribe the fiscal incontinence of the Blair/Brown governments to some sort of Keynesian economic theory, though that fails to explain why they applied fiscal ‘stimulus’ for seven years to an already growing economy.
If you were being slightly less charitable you might ascribe it to incompetence of a quite staggering degree. The lastLabour government, after all, were probably the biggest set of mediocre idiots ever to govern this country.
And, if you were being even less charitable, you might ascribe it to something more sinister – Brown poisoning the wells when he heard opposition tanks at the end of his strasse.
The architects of this national disaster have moved on. Blair is swanning around the globe earning millions. Brown is off brooding somewhere and probably enjoying it. Ed Balls, Brown’s right hand man through all this, is now, incredibly, Labour’s shadow minister for the economy!
We will have to live with the consequences of their mismanagement for years, why should they get away scot free? When we look at the continuing harm the Blair/Brown governments did to Britain shouldn’t we consider some sort of economic Nuremberg for these people? To punish them, Blair, Brown, and Balls, for the harm they have done to the British public?
Of course, you could argue that the electorate is responsible for electing these dangerous cretins. After all, every single majority Labour government in history has left office (in 1931, 1951, 1970, 1979, and 2010) with the economy in meltdown. Assuming that Labour voters aren’t so stupid that they don’t know this you have to conclude that they simply don’t care if the economy collapses.
In the wake of the Barclays rate fixing scandal, Ed Miliband has called for a full public inquiry into the banking industry, saying, “If you go out and nick £50 from Tesco, you are punished, at least we hope that you are punished – if you fiddle, lie, cheat to the tune of millions of pounds, you should also have the full force of the law brought against you.”
As Britain’s economy continues to smoulder isn’t it time for Miliband’s former colleagues in the wretched Labourgovernment of 1997 to 2010, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Ed Balls, to face a reckoning for the continuing damage they wrought upon the nation?
John Phelan is a Contributing Editor for The Commentator and a Fellow at the Cobden Centre. He has also written for City AM and Conservative Home and he blogs at Manchester Liberal. Follow him on Twitter at @TheBoyPhelan
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