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Labour still not rising to the challenge over HSBC, Barclays, G4S, FTT

As the disasters one after another, all interconnected via the underlying neoliberal ideology, betoken a real fin de siecle, Labour is still failing to shoot into a wide open goal.   As HSBC is exposed sitting atop a mountain of corruption which bears comparison with the utterly discredited (and destroyed) BCCI, where is Labour calling for taking it into public ownership, closing down immediately all the corrupt and rotten parts of the banking empire, prosecuting all the senior directors (not just the Mammon-worshipping Green) responsible for a decade of the worst malfeasance, and re-launching the clean elements into a network of smaller banks directly servicing British industry and the public interest?

For Barclays’ machinations over LIBOR, we have to await the parliamentary select committee, on which Labour is locked into a small minority role.   But why isn’t Labour raising questions about whether Britain wants a bank with an anti-public interest buccaneering style, an arrogant swaggering leadership of the likes of Diamond, an anti-British ideology that prefers to seek rescue by the Qatari royal family rather than from  a UK government despite the special liquidity schemes from the latter which enabled it to survive?   Why is Labour not condemning a bank that shows no real interest in Britain, apart from the protective tax haven provided by the City of London, and is focused rather on overseas speculation and tax avoidance of the most artificially contrived kind?

Why is Labour still saying virtually nothing about the gargantuan global tax havens scandal, a high degree of which is carried out via British Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories, and which is now estimated to cost the world – all but the 0.001% of world population who control half of it – a staggering £13 trillions?   Why is Ed Balls still warning against ‘excessive’ City regulation when the almost total lack of it nearly brought Britain to its knees?

And over G4S, instead of complaining about a huge omnishambles which everyone can see it is, why isn’t Labour calling for an end to out-sourcing for all the reasons so cogently set out by Seumas Milne on beating the privatisation racket and instead setting out the areas where Labour intends to in-source to restore the public interest?   And why is Labour still cravenly supporting the discredited Tory line on an urgently needed Financial Transaction Tax – namely that it shouldn’t be introduced unless part of a global deal – when the UK already has its own unilateral FTT on shares and when Germany, France, Italy and Spain have already agreed to introduce the FTT before the end of 2012?

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