Tony Blair’s Legacy: Northern Rock

Posted on September 18, 2007
Filed Under Business, Politics, News | Leave a Comment


Nobody will be looking for long (most have already given up anyway) to find what might be Tony Blair’s legacy. Vapid, whirligig celebrities tend not to leave legacies, but the one abiding thought that the Blair years did engrave on people’s minds was that politicians cannot be trusted.

Of course, like many celebrity performers, Tony Blair was part of a double act. He was the grinning front man to Gordon Brown’s grumbling, grumpy stooge. More The Odd Couple than Laurel and Hardy, they were still, like most acts from stage and screen, something you either loved or hated. The clue here is that the number of people who love a politician is very small indeed: normally just a few other politicians.

This leaves Gordon Brown with a problem. Not only does the almost universal aura of distrust which belonged to Tony Blair also stick like glue to him, but he was very famously in charge of government sums for a very long time. He can hardly blame new boy Alistair Darling for messing everything up in the last few weeks.

As we watch the unusual spectacle of a run on the banks and Great Britain becomes ever more the epitome of a basket case banana republic, viewed with ill-concealed mocking consternation by the rest of the world, we should remember that it was Blair and Brown who brought us here.

One got out before the shit hit the fan, the other is still doing the big jobs which he always coveted.

BBC News asked some clever people to comment on the UK banking crisis:

DR EAMONN BUTLER, ADAM SMITH INSTITUTE

My economics teachers used to say that the days of a ‘run on the bank’ were long over.

It might have caused problems in the 1930s, but modern banking controls and accounting had consigned bank runs to economic history’s dustbin.

But despite the assurances of politicians and regulators, here we have a run again.

What on earth can be happening? Well, the first thing is that people no longer believe what politicians tell them.

Their years of putting spin over principle has shattered any respect we might have had for them. Sadly, Alistair Darling’s word is just not enough.

And people don’t believe the regulators either.

Their vast bureaucracies have not spared us from failures and foul-up. Just ask the millions who have lost their company pensions.

If, within the regulatory alphabet soup, anyone knows what the Financial Services Authority actually is, they probably know it only as the bunch who make you produce your telephone bill and driving licence, even though you have banked at the same place for thirty years.

And despite their comforting talk, the politicians and regulators must know too that vast queues of people taking out their deposits is not good.

The financial system is highly interdependent.

It could just turn into a real crisis.

Their immediate reaction may be to make credit more plentiful, so that the banks do not run out of cash.

But that is a recipe for more inflation, which is already breaking through its target, thanks to high government spending.

Gordon Brown’s chickens are coming home to roost.

What would you expect of a chickenshit politician?


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Greenspan: Bush, Blair Iraq War - Million Die For Oil

Posted on September 16, 2007
Filed Under Books, Politics, News | 1 Comment


Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, has said that the war in Iraq, propagated and pursued by George Bush and Tony Blair was, after all, and as everyone has always known, about nothing other than exploiting oil reserves.

Africasia.com:

Greenspan memoir links Iraq war to US thirst for oil

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, for years an inscrutable seer on the economy, is causing a stir by alleging in his new memoir that “the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Greenspan, who as head of the US central bank was famous for his tight-lipped reserve, is uncharacteristically direct in “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” also accusing President George W. Bush of abandoning Republican principles on the economy.

“I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows — the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he wrote in reported excerpts of the book, which is set for release on Monday.

Australia’s Herald Sun:

Greenspan labels oil as prime motive for Iraq war

AMERICA’S elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil. Greenspan, 81, is understood to believe that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East.

Britain and America have always insisted the war had nothing to do with oil. President George W. Bush said the aim was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam’s support for terrorism.

The former Federal Reserve chairman’s book also criticises Mr Bush for not responsibly handling spending and racking up big budget deficits.

“The Republicans in Congress lost their way,” Greenspan writes. “They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.”

ThinkProgress:

Today on CNN’s Late Edition, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D-CA) said he agreed with Greenspan “to a large extent,” adding, “I think it is very remarkable that it took Alan Greenspan all these many years and being out of office for stating the obvious.” Watch it:

[…]

Transcript:

BLITZER: Alan Greenspan has a new book that has just come out, Chairman Lantos, entitled, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, in which he makes a very, very sharp charge about the war in Iraq. I’ll read it to you: I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows. The Iraq war is largely about oil. Do you agree with him?

LANTOS: To a very large extent I agree with him, and I think it is very remarkable that it took Alan Greenspan all these many years and being out of office for stating the obvious. It is self-evident that this administration would not have taken the position it has had it not been for the oil issue.

The Guardian:

Greenspan’s damning comments about the war come as a survey of Iraqis, which was released last week, claims that up to 1.2 million people may have died because of the conflict in Iraq - lending weight to a 2006 survey in the Lancet that reported similarly high levels.

More than one million deaths were already being suggested by anti-war campaigners, but such high counts have consistently been rejected by US and UK officials.

[…]

The Lancet survey was criticised by some experts and by George Bush and British officials. In private, however, the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser Sir Roy Anderson described it as ‘close to best practice’.

You could always say, why believe Alan Greenspan? Are you going to believe Bush and Blair? Well, are you?


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Archbishop: Blair Bad, Brown Good

Posted on September 15, 2007
Filed Under Welcome To Great Britain, Politics, News | Leave a Comment


Who do you think would appeal to an archbishop more: a grinning snake-oil salesman who thinks he is the new messiah or a grumpy grandmother snatcher who keeps fiddling with his “moral compass”?

The Telegraph, interviewing the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, says:

Clearly, he was uncomfortable with Tony Blair’s missionary zeal but he admires Gordon Brown’s moral compass. When we ask whether he thinks a Presbyterian Prime Minister will be different to a high Anglican, he says: “The kind of political culture that Gordon Brown has come through is a bit more austere and values-oriented. He has a real level of emotional commitment about global poverty. I’m pleased that one of the first things he did was to reverse the legislation about gambling, and the hint that they might be looking again at 24-hour drinking.”

The problem is you have to know how the hierarchy works. Tony Blair thought he was God’s left hand man, presumably, because George Bush was on the right side, but where does that leave the Archbishop? You would think that he outranks both of them, but if Tony Blair converts to Catholicism, as they say he will, might he not become Pope?  Then he might outrank both Bush and the Archbishop.  Also, if he is the true messiah, does he not outrank everyone anyway?

Anyway, it is all pretty theoretical, according to the Archbishop, as we are all on a hiding to hell anyway.

“Is our society broken? I think it is,” he says. “We are in a phase of our culture where the fragmentation of society is far more obvious. It’s not just families, it is different ethnic communities and economic groups. We talk about access and equality the whole time, but in practice we all seem to live very segregated lives.”

He goes on: “Outside my front door in Lambeth I see a society so dramatically different from across the river or in Canterbury. There is a level of desolation and loneliness and dysfunctionality which many people have very little concept of. If you sense that the world you live in is absolutely closed, that for all sorts of reasons you are unable to move outside, if nothing gives you aspirations, there is an imprisonment in that, there is a kind of resentment that comes with that and a frustration that can boil over in violence and street crime.”

Inequality is, in his view, just a symptom of a wider moral vacuum. “I don’t think that the huge wealth of some is the cause (of the problems), it is more that society just wants to reward business success and celebrity. If you’re a teenager in Peckham neither of those are easily accessible.”

Gordon Brown had better fix his “moral compass” pretty quickly, as it sounds like we are all heading for ‘the rapture’ and if Tony gets to heaven first, he is just as likely to bang the gates shut and start raining hellfire and brimstone down on all those who do not believe in him.


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