In the legal case against HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) over the ‘sweetheart’ tax deal with Goldman Sachs, details have emerged of a controversial cover up to avoid political embarrassment at the heart of government. It came to light in the High Court that the former tax chief, Dave Hartnett, chose to waive the £20 […]
Posts under ‘Finance’
Osborne again shows his preference for uncompetitive capitalism
May 1st, 2013 by Michael Meacher.So Osborne is still determined to return RBS and Lloyds to the private sector before the election. This is despite all the arguments to the contrary – that the private banking system produced the financial crash in the first place with utterly calamitous results, that no significant measures have been put in place to prevent […]
Share:
Against legal loan sharking
Apr 22nd, 2013 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.Payday loans have become something of a sexy political topic. Stella Creasy has done a great deal of work to get it in the spotlight and Ed Miliband kicked off Labour’s local election campaign with a pledge to give councils the power to push payday lenders (and bookies) off the high street. Like the SWP, I’m […]
Share:
Why are the banks that failed us so catastrophically still coddled?
Apr 3rd, 2013 by Michael Meacher.It is almost unbelievable that the banks which (i) cost the taxpayer £68bn in immediate bailout costs, (ii) have pushed up Britain’s national debt to its current level of £1.16 trillion, (iii) have inflated the budget deficit to service this debt to its current £120bn, and (iv) have thus given Osborne the excuse to launch […]
Share:
Policy turns against bank bailouts, and not before time!
Apr 1st, 2013 by Michael Meacher.The Cyprus deal should mark a turning point in the aftermath of the 2008-9 financial crash. Until now bail-outs of Eurozone banks have been almost entirely at taxpayers’ expense. The same applied to Brown’s bailouts of UK banks which cost taxpayers £67bn plus a further several hundred billions in loan guarantees, liquidity support and asset […]
Share:
Four economic boosts when all we’re offered is “responsible capitalism”
Mar 30th, 2013 by Michael Hanratty.On Thursday, I wrote about how in the wake of Osborne’s latest budget, Labour continues to buy into the incompetent neoliberal myths that the government uses to justify their programme of austerity. If only the problems stopped there! Sometimes, when it looks like the left is offering an alternative, it can still fall into the […]
Share:
Why does Labour still buy these incompetent neoliberal myths?
Mar 28th, 2013 by Michael Hanratty.In the first of a two-part series, MICHAEL HANRATTY considers what the left’s reaction to the budget says about the state of Labour thinking. Budget Day being an ordinary working day, I don’t normally get to digest the nuts and bolts of policy until it’s all become more widely discussed and less opaque. But this […]
Share:
Ed Miliband is right, Britain lacks local banks – RBS could fill that void
Mar 26th, 2013 by Tony Greenham.Why not convert a large, publicly owned bank into a network of local banks like those that operate successfully in Germany? Ed Miliband’s speech to the British Chambers of Commerce marked an important step towards filling a vital gap in our banking system – the place where you live. The UK banking system, dominated by […]
Share:
The banks are laughing all the way to the……bank
Mar 10th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.Six years after the baking crisis broke the House of Commons is finally legislating to ensure it doesn’t happen again. It’s a joke if it wasn’t so desperately serious. The Financial Services (Banking Reform) bill, which gets its second reading on Monday (11th), is implementing the Vickers proposals to ring-fence the retail segment of the […]
Share:
Reining in the banks must be more than bonus capping
Mar 7th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.The last ditch defence of unlimited sky-high bankers’ bonuses by Osborne in Brussels exposes as nothing else can the sordid nakedness of Tory values – hands off £10 million bonuses for bankers who nearly crashed the global economy and will hav e cost this country an increase in national debt to £1,400,000,000,000 by 2016 whilst […]
