New Britain: Nation Of Shopkeepers And Bankrupt Billionaires

February 17, 2008 · Filed Under News · Comment 

Hurrah! The people of New Britain are now bankers every one!

We all own a bank and can write cheques for whatever amount we want because it is our money and we own it!

Well, not quite.

Wonderful Gordon “Prudence” Brown and his puppet Darling of the Treasury have actually saddled almost every man, woman and child of this nation with a debt of £1000.

Yes, it sounds like Monopoly money and, of course, that is the way the bankers and politicians look at at when it gets to the level of squillions of squid. After all, they are hardly going to have to find that kind of money in the real world.

That job they leave, as always, to the ordinary taxpayer.

So, Northern Rock has now been nationalised. The choice of last resort.

The only saving grace is that we will not have the indignity of having high streets full of Virgin Banks, selling Virgin Mobiles and Virgin Atlantic flights and Virgin Cola and Virgin Condoms. We have been saved from the bilious spiv dream of Rodney Trotter in Only Fools and Horses.

So, does it feel as if you now have access to untold riches?

Or does it seem that your incompetent government has made yet another total and absolute mess of things and sold you a pup?

We had all better hope that there are no more runs on the banks as the recession starts to bite, otherwise we may all end up paying for their collapse for the rest of our lives.

Gordon Brown: your money unsafe in this man’s clunking iron fist.

Tags: , , , , , ,

British Parliament Now Wholly Owned Subsidiary Of Big Business

February 13, 2008 · Filed Under Politics · Comment 

When Britain was re-named UK Plc under Margaret Thatcher, it sounded like a catchy, if empty slogan. It was just part of the zeitgeist, where everyone was a thrusting go-getter in the dog-eat-dog commercial jungle. In Thatcher’s brave new world, everyone was going to be rich. Apart, of course, from the legions of poor on whom the rich always depend: or, more accurately, on whom they stand after they have trampled them underfoot.

Now, in New Labour’s New Britain, this selling of a nation as a commercial enterprise has actually come to pass. Britain no longer has an independent legislature, but is governed entirely by the diktats of big business.

If Mrs Thatcher was accused of selling the family silver in her mania to sell public assets and utilities on the cheap to businesses on the make, New Labour can trump her in that they have sold the nation down the river because a handful of businessmen barked orders at them and they responded by asking “How high do you want us to jump?”

Everyone knows that the Tory party is just the political wing of business, so from them it is expected. However, not only did New Labour readily jump into bed with big business like the local bike on a drunken night out, it was happy to sell its children and family into prostitution and slavery without actually bothering to ask for payment.

To a degree, it is not that we ever imagined or pretended that business was not pulling the strings of the puppets in Parliament, it is just the clumsy ineptitude of New Labour in making it all so publicly humiliating and so financially incompetent.

Under Blair, they had to receive the blessing of business in order to be electable, but business did not just sprinkle a few drops of water on the figurative forehead of the nation’s government, it gave them a thorough waterboarding. Both Blair and Brown are so in thrall to what they see as the inexplicable mysteries and wonderments of business, the magical enchantment of how business can make money appear as if from nowhere and the trembling craving that maybe, just maybe, some of that could find its way into the pockets of the nation’s administrators, that they have allowed legislation to become entirely subordinate to the whims, quirks and tantrums of a few business leaders.

Alistair Darling, the Chancellor and by default Gordon Brown’s puppet at the Treasury when he is not passing him around the unelected chairmen of New Britain Plc, had thought that taxing people who are not domiciled in the UK for tax purposes, but are making fortunes off the back of the country and its infrastructure and workforce was a modest and reasonable proposal.

The problem was that in Gordon Brown’s ‘government of none of the talents’ there had been an appointment made in the shape of Digby Jones as Minister of State at the newly created Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. Lord Jones obviously saw it as his role to prevent a mere Chancellor from proposing legislation which he felt might not be agreeable to his mates in business.

Darling of the Treasury had to succumb, climb off his ridiculous hobby-horse that the rich should sometimes pay a miniscule amount of tax, humble himself with a grovelling apology and publicly agree that New Britain, from the pinnacle of government to the lowliest babe in arms, are all mere bondsmen to the unelected cabal of international business.

New Britain is now a small cog in the globalisation machine, which business can pull out and replace at any time with a country whose government is more supine and spineless if any lickspittle politician ever dares to stand up and make threats that business cannot keep every last penny of everything it extorts from the slave force of New Britain or anywhere else.

In The Guardian:

Opposition MPs accused the government of muddle and harming Britain’s reputation in the international business community. Business leaders said the government needed to be more careful in future before rushing through “ill thought out” legislation. It called the move a “victory for common sense”.

That is not even code for: “Never try to do anything which business does not like”. That is a master telling a servant to behave or be dismissed.

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrats’ treasury spokesman, said: “The government has made an unholy mess of this issue and is being made to look thoroughly foolish, now it has been demonstrated that ministers haven’t thought through the implications of their own policies.

“However, there has been some outrageous special pleading from the City with wildly exaggerated accounts of the damage that would be done by taxing non-domiciled residents. British taxpayers do not understand why they should pay 40% top rate tax, while the super-rich may pay little more than council tax on houses worth tens of millions.”

Expect more maltreatment of ordinary people by this government, now that its powerlessness has been publicly revealed.

Expect, as usual on the economic front, the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Bulls, Bears, Lemmings And Lemons

February 11, 2008 · Filed Under Business · Comment 

Having “power without responsibility - the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages” is how Rudyard Kipling described some journalists of his time.

Of course, it could also serve the financial communities of the current era, who like to demand plaudits for keeping the country financially afloat when the going is good, but do not want to admit any blame for bankrupting the world when their colossal gambles blow up in their faces.

Banks and major financial institutions love to compare themselves with powerful beasts and pretend that they are the tamers of a frightening jungle full of fearsome creatures, that they occupy the pinnacle of natural selection, but they bleat like frightened lambs trying to negotiate a deep puddle when they want rescuing by the taxpayers they are otherwise forever ready to swindle.

This time, they have followed each other helter-skelter into the sub-prime mortgage con because they each thought the other was going to make a fortune and they were too scared and stupid to check whether the boat they thought they could not afford to miss was actually about to capsize and sink.

This from The Guardian:

The hard-hitting Financial Stability Forum report blamed feckless investors and irresponsible banks for exacerbating the credit crunch, which has pushed America to the brink of recession. Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has already slashed interest rates by 2.25 per cent in the last five months - the fastest cuts for more than 25 years - in a desperate attempt to contain the crisis.

Presenting the first findings from their study of the credit crunch, the central bankers revealed a catalogue of failures that allowed risky ’sub-prime’ lending to Americans with shaky credit records to career out of control, through what they called ‘the complex network of interdependencies in the financial system’.

One culprit was the lavish performance-pay regime on Wall Street and in the City, which, they say, ‘encouraged disproportionate risk-taking with insufficient regard to longer-term risks’. The secretive ‘off balance sheet’ accounting used by many banks to hide their borrowing was also criticised.

By the way, ‘the complex network of interdependencies in the financial system’ is too complicated a way of putting it. ‘The blind leading the blind’ or ‘a fool and his money are soon parted’ put it simpler and better.

So, the fact that the world is now in economic turmoil, possibly with a major global recession becoming an unavoidable outcome is down to a bunch of greedy bankers.

Anyone see any hands going up to claim responsibility?

Of course not. What we get instead is the shrill screaming of the scared little lamb who thinks he might be asked to pay some tax. Of course, picking up the bill for the profligacy and irresponsibility of big business has traditionally been the job of the small, individual taxpayer. No government likes to pass the begging bowl amongst the rich in case the job offers fail to materialise when you get to the sunny side of that magical revolving door.

How many banking jobs does Tony Blair hold at the moment, by the way?

The Times Online makes a veiled threat to the government not to tax these wonderful, sleek, thoroughbred animals, who put food on everyone’s tables:

The City of London earns the living of the United Kingdom. Without the City’s earning power, Britain might dwindle into an insolvent dwarf, the Northern Rock of nations.

[...]

International businesses choose their locations not only on existing costs and tax rates, but also on estimate of future costs and taxes. Their boards thought, correctly, that Mr Blair believed in entrepreneurial competition and wanted to keep British taxes as competitive as possible. They had thought the same of Mrs Thatcher. They felt there were unlikely to be unpleasant surprises from either prime minister, but they have never trusted Gordon Brown in the same way, though they hoped that Mr Blair would not allow Mr Brown to adopt anti-business policies. When Mr Brown became Prime Minister, businessmen felt less safe, but were prepared to wait and see. Now Mr Brown himself and Mr Darling are introducing this new regime for non-doms, even though it will cover a large proportion of executives of all international businesses, including banks.

Apart from the fact that this is the best example recently of the way in which big business is not even pretending to disguise the fact that it barks orders at elected governments and expects to be obeyed, would it not be more honest to say that when this bunch of bankers make a mess of things, they are never too proud to go cap in hand to the government to ask it to hand over the odd 50 billion squid of taxpayers’ money.

For all the grand posturings and fine facades, banks are actually financial lemons run by a herd of spivs who are good at sums when the money is rolling in and run around like headless chicken when they are asked to behave like rational, moral human beings.

Did you want to go into banking when you lose office, Mr Brown?

Tags: , , , , ,

Next Page »

Bad Behavior has blocked 225 access attempts in the last 7 days.