Banks, bonuses and botch-ups

When the Queen asked "Didn't anyone see it coming?" she may not have been looking directly at the prime minister at the time. Maybe she should have prodded him with a stick or got a corgi or two to nip him. Only now is it possible for Gordon Brown to admit that he was duped by the banks.

Brown says now, "In the 1990s, the banks, they all came to us and said, 'Look, we don't want to be regulated, we want to be free of regulation'. All the complaints I was getting from people was, 'Look you're regulating them too much'. And actually the truth is that globally and nationally we should have been regulating them more. So I've learnt from that. So you don't listen to the industry when they say, 'This is good for us'. You've got to talk about the whole public interest." Well, Well. You don't say!!!

It's taken him all this time to recognise that the banks don't just take people's money in and invest it by lending it to others. No, that's far too tame. Far better to have "vehicles" and mix dodgy loans up with the good and flog them off to others who know less about it. Banks are now operating in some kind of Las Vegas style. How many times have we seen that the directors of these banks hadn't a clue what was going on. Northern Rock was a prime example, or would sub-prime be a better expression.

What I find reprehensible is that the leading politicians find it so difficult to trust the public. They feel it better to prevaricate or lie. It is so sad to think that only 4% of the electorate thinks they are trustworthy. To what depths have we sunk? I suppose we can be pleased Gordon Brown has at last begun to see reason. One wonders if he should have taken his moral compass to the repairers moons ago. But at least it's flickering in the right direction. Won't make me vote Labour though. Somehow it's ingrained in me that there's something strangely foreign about the Labour Party. Yes, we've got New Labour and its precious precociousness but I still remember Red Flags and raw socialism as if it were a communist-lite offering.

So we've got a ray of truthfulness creeping in. Great! But let's not forget that the electorate has to be truthful too. Can't have only one side being good, can we?