It is the bankers who pay the rat Lawson who want London as an offshore money-laundering centre outside the EU. This is what Lawson said about the EU today:
“Economic disadvantages are much greater than the advantages. In particular – it is not the only thing, but in particular – the attempt to overregulate and to cut down to size the financial services sector, banking and financial services including insurance which we need in this country, this is already causing great concern to people in the Bank of England, it is extremely damaging to one of our biggest industries so the economic minus is a very big one.”
BBC News Channel today 12.43PM.
It was of course Lawson who was Thatcher’s accomplice in destroying most of our real industries, the ones which actually made something visible. It was replaced by the crazed idea of elevating the financial services sector, from providers of middlemen services for a small percentage, into the greatest net recipients of income in the economy, through creation of price gambling instruments and South Sea Bubble schemes. The result has on average cost everybody in the UK and US the equivalent of their housing cost again in extra tax, plus plunged the entire world into recession.
All that tax, plus the 225 billion sterling extra money from QE in the UK alone, has just been given to the bankers so they can have no interruption in their gambling or lifestyles.
Let us not exaggerate the marginal changes the EU has been seeking to make. Instead of banning whole classes of derivative trading, they are merely looking to institute a transaction tax (entirely sensible in itself) and put some limit to the financial rewards of bankers – who will still get massively better paid than equivalent workers elsewhere. But even that is too much moderation for the insatiable greed of Lawson and his ilk, and they would rather destroy the EU than have any bounds placed on their wealth.
In a recent posting, I pointed out that, precisely opposite to the way it had been reported in the mainstream media, the recent Eurobarometer poll showed that voters, specifically including UK voters, had more trust in the EU than in national government. They also wanted the EU to control the likes of Lawson and his chums in the City:
Here are some more details of the Eurobarometer poll the Guardian omitted in its total misrepresentation. 70% wish to see a stronger EU role in regulating the financial services industry (p.28) and on the same page, 76% want to see stronger EU coordination of economic policy.
Large majorities across Europe support:
the introduction of a tax on financial transactions (71%)
tighter rules for credit rating agencies (79%)
a tax on profits made by banks (83%)
tighter rules on tax avoidance and tax havens (61%)These are all areas where the Tory government has been among those blocking effective EU action, against the will of the people of the EU.
That is why the bankers are against the EU.
“Hate the bad.”
I don’t know that I am hating anyone.
All I do is have a different definition of bad. Killing is bad, even if it is us doing the killing, even if the people we are killing are a different religion and a long way away. Greed is bad, even when it’s us grabbing far more than our share of the world’s resources. Nationalism is bad as history has shown.
People grabbing power for themselves by manipulating the people using tribalist instincts and greed is bad. As who it is doing it.
Ref Irish apology to those who joined the Allies. 60,000 apparently.
Since he first announced his plan for an amnesty for Irish soldiers who deserted the Irish Army to fight with the British army against Nazi Germany during World War Two, Minister for Justice and Defence Alan Shatter has chosen to present his actions as part of a process of righting a historic wrong.
Last year, he chose to present Irish neutrality from 1939-45 as “a principle of moral bankruptcy” in the context of the Holocaust; a shameful opting out of the defining moral issue of that era.
Yesterday, in the context of the legislation to grant an apology and an apology to the deserting soldiers, he presented it as the State finally acknowledging “the important role they played in seeking to ensure a free and safe Europe”.
/..
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/few-will-disagree-with-apology-but-desertion-was-serious-offence-29250089.html
People grabbing power for themselves by manipulating the people using tribalist instincts and greed is bad. As who it is doing it.
You know a better way of grabbing power? Sorry mate, but we are dealing with human beings here. Like all pack animals, grabbing power is a very basic survival trait. As is tribalism generally. It’s not bad, m’kay*? It’s part of the scenery.
Nationalism is bad as history has shown. (m’kay?)
Without nationalism there wouldn’t BE any bloody history.
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnU2f-rrvcg
“You know a better way of grabbing power? Sorry mate, but we are dealing with human beings here. Like all pack animals, grabbing power is a very basic survival trait. As is tribalism generally. It’s not bad, m’kay*? It’s part of the scenery.”
Incest is a very basic survival trait among pack animals too, as is infanticide.
“Without nationalism there wouldn’t BE any bloody history.”
And we wouldn’t have had all those bloody wars to ensure half the world lives on less than a dollar a day.
Ch 4 News (ITN) appear to be giving this anti-EU message a large amount of coverage. They announced tonight via the ex BBC Michael Crick that Denis Healey is supporting Lawson. Why do ITN have this agenda?
Healey: case for leaving Europe stronger than staying
Thursday 09 May 2013
The former Labour chancellor of the exchequer Denis Healey has joined the fast-growing group of former political heavyweights who have declared against Britain’s continued membership of the European Union.
Lord Healey told me from his home in Sussex tonight:
“I wouldn’t object strongly to leaving the EU. The advantages of being members of the union are not obvious. The disadvantages are very obvious. I can see the case for leaving – the case for leaving is stronger than for staying in.”
Lord Healey, who was chancellor at the time of the last referendum of Europe in 1975, added: “The trouble about Europe is what I call the Olive Line, the line below which people grow olives. North of the Olive Line people pay their taxes and spend public money very cautiously. South of it they fail to pay their taxes at all, but spend a lot of public money.”
But Lord Healey, who will be 96 in August, added that he did not feel strongly enough about the matter to do an on-camera broadcast interview.
In the last few days the former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson announced he would vote no in the event of a yes-no referendum, while another former chancellor, Norman Lamont, today said that he, too, would vote no. But Lamont added that, unlike Lawson, he still felt it was still worth making one more effort to try for a fundamental renegotiation of Britain’s membership.
It means that chancellors covering 14 of the 40 years of Britain’s membership of the EU – Denis Healey (Labour, 1974-79), Nigel Lawson (Conservative, 1983-89) and Norman Lamont (Conservative 1990-93) – have now said they think Britain would be better off leaving the European Union.
http://blogs.channel4.com/michael-crick-on-politics/healey-case-for-leaving-europe-stronger-than-staying/2494
I like the headline! As if that will happen. No communique either.
G7 finance ministers to discuss banking reforms
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22476233
Why the coyness about the location? Are they afraid we might all descend to give them a rollicking?
Reuters have it as a 17th century stately home 40 miles NW of London. Seems an appropriate setting for a nice jolly.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/09/us-g-idUSBRE9480CN20130509
Might it be held here, one of three NT hotels? It is closed for bookings today and tomorrow. £200+ per night plus the fine dining. Nice one Gideon. Carry on in the style to which you have become accustomed.
http://www.hartwell-house.com/access-for-all/
I didn’t know the NT had hotels.
Incest is a very basic survival trait among pack animals too, as is infanticide.
Sure. Not saying it’s good, just that it’s always there under the surface. I refer you to your close relative the chimpanzee* for all sorts of awful things pack animals do, and we do too, sometimes. Including, at a basic level, war.
*my coldblooded relatives are superior in many respects, if poisonous.
And we wouldn’t have had all those bloody wars to ensure half the world lives on less than a dollar a day.
Or central heating. Or much else, come to that.
All very well to decry nationalism, as Erich Fromm does :
Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our
insanity. ‘Patriotism’ is its cult… Just as love for one
individual which excludes the love for others is not love,
love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love
for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.
Wouldn’t disagree with a syllable of that…but as an embedded feature of the way you function, it’s not going to be erased by trying to proscribe it. Your struggling masses on half a dollar a day would like to proscribe hunger, too. (and most of them, as, er, history demonstrates, will revolt at the behest of a leader who correctly invokes their own nationalism/tribalism. You don’t have to be genetically related to be a tribe, in this sense.)
I recommend you read Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” to expand your thinking on this. The key word is ‘granfalloon’. It has a Wiki entry.
Confirmation – The G7 meeting is being held as Hartwell House.
Gideon is looking extra smooth there this morning.
Eurozone crisis live: Osborne calls on central banks to drive recovery at G7
Live• UK chancellor urges monetary activism to nurture growth
• Britain’s trade gap narrows
• Italian recession looks set to drag on
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/may/10/eurozone-crisis-live-germany-challenged-austerity-g7
Q What is monetary activism? QE?
Lawson is a good man and was a good chancellor.
Following the crash of 2008,I’m surprised that bankers were not hanging from lamposts.
What happened to them…?
G.B. and A.D. went to ask some bankers what to do about the bust banks,and surprise surprise they said “bail them out”.
Gutless!craven.
Why?
Lawson told them in 1987,to take their losses,even if it meant that they went bust.
Er, link please, Geoffrey. In 1987, Lawson was initiating a period of extremely high interest rates, and while acknowledging that the preceding year’s oil price collapse hadn’t helped, was very upbeat about the economy. I don’t recall the banks being in anything like the shit they’re in now, but maybe my memory is defective?
Here’s Lawson advocating nationalising RBS this year:
http://www.newstatesman.com/business/financial-services/2013/02/fully-nationalise-rbs-says-nigel-lawson
I think his recognition of the unacceptable face of capitalism came later, rather than sooner…who knows. it may only be an attempt at buying popular support for his other lunatic ideas anyway. If he were Chancellor today, he’d be playing touchy-feely with the bankers like any other politician.
April Showers –
“Q What is monetary activism? QE?”
Not quite, but close. Intentional inflation. Or, pumping up the funny-money balloon again.
This guy –
http://www.cobdencentre.org/2013/03/monetary-activism-must-end-in-a-slump/#
seems to have the general picture.
In passing, this could well be worth a read. Looks as if it annoys everyone, therefore probably truthful. Even the review is angry:
http://www.cobdencentre.org/2013/05/the-corruption-of-capitalism-in-america/
“Or central heating. Or much else, come to that.”
I haven’t got central heating.
Central heating is destroying the planet.
If you’re cold put more clothes on.
“I recommend you read Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradl”
I’ve read it, read all his books. He was in Dresden the night we fire bombed it you know. Only survived because the Germans were keeping prisoners in a cold storage room at an abattoir. Came out next morning and saw what we had done, what Nationalism had caused.
KOmodo.During the largest privatisation ever (at the time)of BP.£7.25bn. on 14th Oct 1987. The underwriting banks were left with substantial losses,the foreign ones alone more than £330m enough to put some out of business. They,and Rothschilds, and the Bank of England pressurised Lawson to pull the issue,also the US gov’t and Alan Greenspan,even I think the Labour party. He refused.
There was also a stockmarket crash in October 1987.Remember?
Don’t you think he wanted to fully nationalise RBS so that he could sack them and not pay them bonuses?
It is consistent that Lawson would look for scapegoats for systemic economic failure resulting from the policies he pursued against all logic, prudence and common-sense, but driven by blind dogma and cronyism. Nevertheless BP was under-sold at giveaway prices, like all privatisations. Players in this game, big institutions largely – not small shareholders – would of course seek to get their hands on the ‘family silver’, on the cheap, cutting out the PR stunt of widening share ownership, in this case by seeking to pull the public issue, deliver it all into their hands outright, to save the institutions from distasteful (to them) task of having to hoover up all the small shareholdings into their own hands. Stockmarket crashes require two frantic agents, sellers and buyers, the buyers waiting and buying cheap by the bucketload as prices bottom out, nothing ‘just happens’ spontaneously, these two parties are really one and the same, buying back for less that they had not long just sold for more. The shrinking band of small shareholders who’d maxed out and got lucky on Britoil, Telecom, Gas, Electricity etc. privatisations, in this case were to have little or no profit, by this active depression of post-issue share prices, compared to those other privatisations where share prices rose and small investors quickly cashed in, to the annoyance of the big fish, but their sense of undue entitlement to any and all spoils, would be thwarted no more, City and Government’s indivisible partnership in crime re-affirmed.
May 10, 2013
Britain must take the lead in Europe, not decline outside
By Michael Heseltine
Isolation would make us weaker and poorer.
The EU was born in another age. In the aftermath of the second world war, the continent’s leading powers built a structure that would prevent them from taking up arms against one another again. This week, my former cabinet colleague, Lord Lawson, has recommended that its time has passed, and that Britain should leave the community. But even if the immediate threat of war has gone, the case for Britain to remain a committed EU member is still strong. Leaving would be a calamitous mistake.
Britain has always been a little semi-detached. We did not sign up to the Treaty of Rome in 1957, which established what later became the EU. There were six countries that did, but the deal struck there was principally shaped by Paris and Berlin. It opened up a wider market for exports for German industry in return for a system of support for France’s farmers.
That was a missed opportunity for the UK. Back then, Britain was Europe’s obvious leader: our lonely stand against fascism and alliance with the US had enabled the liberation of the continent. The Europeans wished us to be part of their unfolding journey. It was, however, not to be – at least until Ted Heath took us into the union – then the “European Economic Community” – in 1973.
/..
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/88ebd984-b89f-11e2-869f-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2SxqBQpUD
Seems the FT wants our cash for the Heseltine comment, April Showers !
Parky I just register for free with an e-mail address and password. I think there is a limit on the number of articles. I just happened to hear the good Bishop of Hulme mentioning the piece when he was reviewing the papers on BBC News this morning. He is strongly opposed to us leaving the EU.
My earlier comment.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/05/fat-cat-culture/#comment-407648
An I am against the EU because it for so long has fed these rats.
I use to say that the EU is a trade union for politicians that don’t want to be controlled by their electorates. While they have drawn this neoliberal gambling den down over our heads, they have constantly blamed the EU and their colleagues for it, saying they can’t do otherwise because of EU rules. It is only now, then the finance scandal is threatening destruction of the whole European economy that they EXTEMELY carefully begin to rein it – in a “marginal” way, as you put it yourself.
Let us not fool ourselves to think the EU is anything radically different than our own corrupt governments. It’s our own corrupt governments grown large.
Viva España!
May 8, 2013
Spain has ruled against extraditing a former HSBC employee to Switzerland, where he faces charges of stealing client banking data subsequently used by a number of European countries to pursue suspected tax evaders.
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/Spanish_court_refuses_to_extradite_ex-HSBC_man.html?cid=35771016
What Cryptonym said.
Fred: Or computers. I don’t have central heating, anyway. I’m poikilothermic. And it’s humans who are destroying the planet.
Good satire from Bill Oddie. Not Spring Watch or Autumn Watch but Bank Watch on HSBC’s funding of Malaysian deforestation.
Wait for the heavies in Canary Wharf to evict him at the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX3k75ps0VQ&feature=player_embedded#!
Well I live deep in the EU in Bavaria – the richest part of Europe and the quality of life here is very very high.
I miss Britain like mad but the Britain I miss doesn’t exist anymore.
I like to think Britain as it used to be was a bit like Trumpton or Chigley!