Sunday 28 February 2010
Lib Dems
Monday 8 February 2010
Climate change is the new Europe
According to one MP, over 80% of the Tory party don't believe in climate change, or if they do they now believe it will be too expensive to address. Is this not a significant failing? How on earth can they be voted in off the back of a Bush-like refusal to deal with the world's most pressing issue?
Exposing the policy vaccuum
Monday 4 January 2010
Monday 23 November 2009
Could it be?
If the Daily Mail are chucking this out?........
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1230109/MELANIE-PHILLIPS-Cynicism-cheap-stunts-voters-dont-trust-Tories.html
Thursday 12 November 2009
Some spot on analysis from the Standard
Of course, it's tactical retreat stuff - Labour will lose the next election - but it doesn't have to be the massacre circa 1997 for the Tories. Labour have (some) stuff to be proud of, need recharging and can come back with something better in four years. The best us left-leaning folk can hope for, I guess (although whether the Labour party are "left-leaning" anymore is another debate in itself).
Wednesday 4 November 2009
The banks
Some interesting items from yesterday - none of it cheerful.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/nov/02/globalisation-financial-markets-reforms
1) Option one is the Schumpeterian one: this is an era of creative destruction, so we may as well grin and bear it. The problem of the financial system is that the market has not been allowed to function properly: badly run banks need to be allowed to fail so that good banks can thrive (not very Keynesian, ie the markets are incapable of self-correcting).
2) The second option is business as usual, which, predictably enough, is the one favoured by the City and Wall Street. Given the size of their welfare cheques from the taxpayer, big finance can hardly demur at the prospect of tougher regulation, but it is lobbying hard against more radical change. There is plenty of talk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
The Conservatives are in this camp, not just because David Cameron bizarrely thinks the crisis was caused by too much government rather than too little but because Boris Johnson is actively lobbying on behalf of City hedge funds and private equity firms to block tougher European regulation.
3) Option three is business as usual plus extras. This recognises that there has been a systemic problem in the financial sector but sees the answer as tighter supervision, better surveillance of the global economy from the International Monetary Fund, changes to capital adequacy rules to ensure that banks can't lend as freely during booms, and new incentive structures for financiers that will favour long-term growth of the business over short-term speculative activity. This, no prizes for guessing, is where you would find Gordon Brown and Barack Obama.
But there is a motley band of discontents for whom business as usual, in whatever form, means that another crisis will erupt before too long. They argue that the exiguous nature of current reform proposals is explained by the institutional capture of governments by the investment banks, the world's most powerful lobbying groups.
4) Finally, there are those who believe that any conventional reform is doomed because any growth-based model is at odds with the viability of the planet. (My favourite)
Where is the political centre of gravity now? Somewhere between option two and three. That represents not just a missed opportunity but a profound lack of judgment.
The seeds of the next crisis are being sown. Right here, right now.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/03/banking-rbs-lloyds-darling
What this is really about is preserving the government's exit strategy. By taking Lloyds out of the APS, it can avoid more swingeing punishment from Brussels and keep the government's stake below 50%. By keeping RBS in the APS, it can maintain the appearance that this bank is still in the private sector and is not entirely a bottomless pit.
But is this really the only option?
Had the government had the courage to bite the bullet last autumn and admit that both banks were, in effect, fully nationalised, it is possible to envisage an alternative scenario.
The improved trading conditions would have fed directly through to increased value for taxpayers (rather than leaking out to other investors).
We would have avoided hundreds of millions in fees to the advisers who dreamt up all these convoluted schemes.
And it would still have been possible to consider privatisating them both (ideally in smaller bits),l when conditions improved.
Unfortunately, this would have flown in the face of Treasury orthodoxy that insists the stockmarket is the only judge of long-term value and reliable source of capital.
Neither seem to be case at the moment, and instead, the taxpayer is paying a high price to preserve the fiction that British banking is back on its own two feet.