Exposing the policy vaccuum

Back after a break, and the world's still going to shite. Jonathan Freedland made some interesting observations about the media's role in scrutinising Tory policy pledges - http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/02/david-cameron-conservatives-wobble - if you can call them that. Each day we see another range of conflicting and contradictiry statements from various Opposition ministers - why is no-one pointing this out to the country at large?

Anyone just want to punch him when you see the poster?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/6931790/David-Cameron-sets-out-20-policies-to-boost-NHS.html

Could it be?

A large dollop of wishful thinking but could the tide just be on the turn .....
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

Some spot on analysis from the Standard

Hey it doesn't even cost any money now does it? (how would I know? I live in the South West, the zeitgeist capital of noughties low carbon free-thinking). However I thought this piece from the Standard was pretty coherent: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23767702-power-turns-to-pity-as-brown-gets-it-all-wrong.do
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).

The banks

From my mate Andy...

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.

BNP

No doubt everyone is aware of the recent controversy regarding the BNP on Question Time. The reason they were on the program is because they gained over one million votes at the recent European election. In my opinion most people in the UK are neither fascist nor racist. So the question really is, why?

Cameron's achilles heel, again?

While everyone is talking about the laughable Nick Griffin and BNP, the Tories seem to be worrying about UKIP, who are planning to stand in constituencies where the Tory candidate does not want to back the Lisbon treaty (on EU reform) - http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/oct/25/ukip-cameron-election-threat

Is this the only bit of good news Gordon is likely to have before the election?