The Coalition's Emergency Budget

The Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer gave his emergency budget speech in the House of Commons today, bounded on one side by the Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister and on the other by the Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary to the Treasury, symbolic of the unfamiliar new Politics of Coalition Government.

The Budget contents were about as unpleasant as was expected, with the widely anticipated increase in VAT to 20% (to name but one item), but with a number of welcome ideas for reducing our dependency on out-of-control Welfare Benefits in some areas.

Harriet Harman, acting Leader of the Labour Party made a spirited response in a manner which made one ask why she herself was not a prospective candidate for the Leadership job to be settled in September. But I took issue with her cheap shots against the Liberal Democrats, because had we been given this Budget today by a 100% Conservative Government it would have been a lot more unpleasant than the one we got, tempered as it was in many instances by the influence of the Liberal Democrats within the Coalition.

G20 .. "Anglo-Saxons" versus The Rest?

Well, the great and the good, the bad and ugly, are all gathered in London today for the G20 summit that's intended to put the world to rights.

President Sarkozy of France and Chancellor Merkel of Germany have formed an unholy alliance against those they see as the Anglo-Saxon originators of all the world's financial troubles, i.e., the USA and the UK.

They want more regulation rather than more spending boosts. I am tempted to agree with them. It is hard to avoid the fact that the present troubles did arise from the lightly regulated, laissez-faire kind of capitalism espoused principally by the United States and the United Kingdom. I am inclined to agree that we need more, not less, regulation; and as for delivering financial stimulus we are already up to our ears in hock for generations without borrowing even more to spend our way out of the crisis. We need to expose and close down all these tax havens as well.

Naturally the gathering has encouraged the appearance of thousands of protestors in London, some of which managed to break the windows of the Royal Bank of Scotland and gain entry to smash up a few computers. Since we own most of the RBS these days, I suppose these guys were pretty much breaking into their own premises!

There have been anti-war protesters, anti-globalisation protesters, anti-capitalism protesters, anti-nuclear arms protesters, environmental protesters, socialist worker protesters, trade union protesters, communist protesters, anarchist protesters, and for all I know anti-protest protesters. Apart from the break in to the RBS these huge gatherings have been largely peaceful and handled quite well by the Police. (Update 20th April .. there have since been 90 complaints to the Police Complaints Commission about some Police Officers hiding their identity numbers, and physically assaulting protesters, allegededly causing one death.) City of London bank workers who took it upon themselves to wave fistfuls of £10 notes to the assembled crowds probably cannot be described as the world's greatest practitioners of tact and diplomacy!

I wish the G20 gathering well in their endeavours.

Today's Motion for Debate

Today's Motion for Debate is ..

Bankers are Wankers

Last year American bankers paid themselves $18.4 billion in bonuses during the period the whole system was spinning out of control.

President Obama has, rightly, condemned them.

There are currently riots in Paris over the French Government's bank bail-out plans. It is understandable that there is going to be mounting anger amongst the average Joe Public in a number of countries when it becomes clear how disgusting the behaviour of the banking community has been in recent years.

I doubt that public anger will be assuaged until or unless they start seeing a few more of these parasites being consigned to a prison cell.

And talking of bail-outs, why are America and Britain now in the process of giving financial assistance to the automotive industry? What are people who work in other industries and services to think whilst they are being closed down and made redundant?  Surely, once you decide selectively that one industry deserves saving, then natural justice dictates that all are worth some assistance, and yet we see thousands of people losing their jobs every week, and we see the Woolworths chain closed down and boarded up in every High Street.

The world is in financial meltdown through the greedy and immoral activities of an entire breed of people who were once looked up to as the model of probity and respectability. How did they get from that place to this place where they are looked down upon as greedy, grasping, selfish, idiotic, blinkered, self-centred wankers?

They got there because our governments were stupid enough to let them.

Riot, anyone?