Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
Cavey wrote:
I'm still waiting for an acknowledgement of Labour's catastrophic failures in office, even 'just' the big ones i.e. their lack of banking regulation
Oh, we're back on this.
Cras wrote:
Come on, man. I've never voted labour a day in my life, I'm anything but an apologist. I'd suggest that I am most likely to be the forum's best informed person (dubious honour though that is) on financial regulatory matters, however. There is no such thing as a UK financial regulatory environment. There hasn't been a UK financial regulatory environment since the eighties. Every single piece of regulation is agreed by every regulator. The reasons for this should be obvious - the minute one place becomes overly onerous to operate in, banks will shift operations elsewhere. That's why we never ended up with the 'Robin Hood Tax', or similar. The UK makes too much from the City to enforce any punishing level of regulation, and most other countries are in the same boat.
So what you have is effectively a cartel. A global group of banks, and a global group of regulators. Now the regulators do a decent job of tightening up the rules - Basel3 is a great example of something done post-crash to greatly improve the survivability of financial institutions by enforcing higher capital reserves - but everything they do is agreement by committee. If the UK wants to triple capital reserves and the US doesn't, it flat out doesn't happen.
So the light-touch banking regulation absolutely cannot be put at New Labour's door. It just can't. Literally the only thing they could have done is stood up, said 'fuck banking', implemented entirely their own UK-specific regulatory environment, and gutted the country's economy overnight.
Now, how the crisis was handled, you can absolutely blame Labour for, if you like. The response to it was entirely within their own control. Should they have bailed out the banks? I say yes, but of course that's motivated in no small measure by self-interest. Even without self-interest, of course, you're talking about a huge number of jobs and a massive impact to customers if the businesses go under. A lot of the choices that were made were excellent ones - the Special Liquidity scheme, as well as underwriting the FSCS to make sure that customers didn't lose their money when the banks did. There's plenty of arguments to be made on both sides there, of course.
We're not "back on" anything. In your mind, one solitary post which may have gone unanswered (I can't recall) counts as some kind of 'vindication' and a line drawn, conveniently ignoring literally hundreds of other posts that I, and others have made, before and since. But this is precisely the syndrome I'm talking about: one can argue about
degrees of culpability on the part of Labour, the banks in London, the banks in New York and the US government, but only a delusional imbecile would believe there was no such culpability on the part of the then UK government, whose immutable, undeniable duty it was, and is, to successfully and effectively regulate the banks (whether you like it or not).
If you're dregdging up old posts, Gaywood, you might like to find those ones where I
directly quote senior members of that Labour administration publicly apologizing very specifically for these horrendous mistakes - but I forget, according to you they didn't really mean it or whatever it was you said. So even when you hear it from multiple horses' mouths, you still refuse to accept or believe it - because that is what we are talking about here. You, and others like you are simply unable to accept it - temperamentally or whatever else.
_________________
Beware of gavia articulata oculos...
Dr Lave wrote:
Of course, he's normally wrong but
interestingly wrong
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