So you are a reasonably successful business person with an interest in politics, but you lack the elementary ideological commitment actually to take out a Labour Party membership card. Well, you’re in luck. Ed Miliband will today unveil his plans to make you a Labour councillor, or even an MP. The news comes just one day after […]
Posts under ‘Finance’
After Barclays now it’s HSBC: will corruption at the top ever stop?
Jul 12th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.HSBC now looks to be heading for the biggest fine ever for Europe’s biggest bank. It stands accused of failing to properly implement money-laundering controls designed to prevent terrorists and others from using its services to advance their criminal ends. Two facts stand out from this case. One is that HSBC is a British bank, but […]
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Key to challenging power of banks is regaining control of money supply
Jul 10th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.The discovery by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that the financial services industry spent £92m last year lobbying politicians and regulators shows how deeply entrenched the banks have become in the UK power structure contrary to the public interest. The documents show that that lobbying firepower was used to slash UK Corporation Tax (Osborne caving in to […]
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Ed Miliband’s prescription for the banks won’t do the job
Jul 9th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.At last a politician is coming up with some serious proposals to deal with the banks. Osborne has done virtually nothing, even watering down the already inadequate Vickers recommendations. Cable has a much clearer and more effective reform programme to apply, but is caged by the Coalition. Ed Miliband to his credit is today issuing a set […]
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Why are the Tories so coy about a judge-led inquiry?
Jul 6th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Parliament was at its worst yesterday. The mud wrestlers Osborne and Balls were so dementedly determined to lay toxic blame on each other for the shocking LIBOR scandal that the City escaped with hardly a bruise to its name. The difference between a judge-led inquiry and a special parliamentary select committee inquiry is not that […]
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Bob Diamond, Show Trials and the Society of the Spectacle
Jul 5th, 2012 by Lucy Reese.The furore around Diamond also reminds me of something that happened way back in the dark days of the 80s, in the Wild West atmosphere of the City post the Big Bang of 1986. The roots of our current troubles can be traced back to those days, when regulations separating investment and high street banking were removed and the finance genie was soon out of the bottle. (Cue gratuitous shots of 80s city workers.)
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Bank inquiry could open up secret Tory-City deals which threaten government
Jul 5th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.So why are the Tories so determined to block a proper judge-led inquiry into the whole corrupt culture of banking which is so obviously needed? Their only argument is the need for speed to deal with the shocking LIBOR revelations. Ed Miliband yesterday at PMQs neatly overturned that argument by saying that a judge-led inquiry […]
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Leveson-style inquiry into banks needed, not inter-MPs mud-slinging
Jul 4th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.They’re being forced to yield inch by inch. First, Barclays’ chairman Agius said he had no intention of resigning; 24 hours later he’d gone. Then the shameless and disgraced chief executive Diamond announced that he was the best person to oversee a change in culture at the bank, having told us a few months ago […]
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This latest bank crisis leaves several vital questions unanswered
Jul 3rd, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Since the rigging of the key inter-bank lending rate (LIBOR) has been going on since 2005, why did it require the US Department of Justice to bring this enormous scam to light and why were the British authorities (FSA, Bank of England and Treasury) asleep at the wheel? Why were the top management of the banks so monumentally incompetent, or so wilfully blind, as not even to notice a clue in 7 years?
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Labour after LIBOR
Jul 2nd, 2012 by David Osler.If anyone out there is still making the intellectual case for further banking deregulation, they are keeping strangely quiet right now. And yet for the longest time, an automatic presumption in its favour constituted the prevailing orthodoxy among Conservative and New Labour politicians alike. Last week’s revelations about Barclay’s complicity in rigging the London Interbank […]
