Gordon Brown today once again exhibited his extraordinary propensity to behave as an opposition politician, notwithstanding having been in joint or sole charge of the government of this country since 1997.
Speaking to Labour activists (and what a stubbornly optimistic bunch of die-hards they must be) in Bristol, the Prime Minister said:
“Some of the practices now being discovered in our banks are not only unacceptable, they are indefensible and they have got to be cleaned up now.
“Many of the bank executives who got banks into this mess have now left their jobs; the boards of failed banks have gone; the four most senior executives of HBOS and RBS have all now left their jobs; seven non-executive directors of RBS lost their jobs; the HBOS board has ceased to exist.
“And we are exploring all the legal action necessary to recover pension payments from people who received too much.”
Practices now being discovered? What in heaven’s name is he talking about? What about the regulatory regime that he personally put in place? What about all those tripartite meetings between the Bank of England, the FSA and the former Chancellor’s own Treasury officials? Are we to believe that tea was sipped, biscuits delicately nibbled, pleasantries exchanged, and nothing more?
And does the Prime Minister really believe that somehow everyone has forgotten the evidence given by Adair Turner to the Treasury only three days ago that the FSA had been leaned on by the Government – his Government – to apply a non-intrusive “light touch” in regulating the financial sector? Does he truly think that such mass, collective amnesia has gripped the British people?
The PM is right to observe that many of the bank executives at fault have now left their jobs; the problem, however, is that the Government whose regulators were responsible for the oversight of the banks is still in place, its ministers lurching dysfunctionally from one crisis to the next, with no apparent clue what to do, save to rack up unsustainable, crippling debt for this generation, the next and goodness knows how many after.
The Prime Minister has the astonishing capacity to behave as if he has just been beamed here from some far-flung galaxy in the deepest recesses of space and is consequently unencumbered with any responsibility whatever for what has happened in the economy over the last decade and a bit.
From his perspective, this may be a most useful facility, sparing him the anguish of confronting his own deficiencies.
To the rest of us, however, contemplating his seemingly genuinely-held belief in his own infallibility, he presents a most disturbing spectacle.
What we all have to realise in this matter is that the Prime Minister (or is it the sub prime minister)
is not to blame.
Labour have so many think-tanks to help with government of the country that they don’t have a thought process to combat failure. There is no “failure think-tank” therefore Gordon cannot be held to blame.
The government is having to think on its feet and it has never had to do this before. This is unprecendented territory and we are seeing our government as it is underneath all its media hype.
It is a gibbering mess, waving its’ arms and its fingers in a hectoring “control freak” sort of way and lurching from one crisis to another.
One thing can be relied on though; SOMEONE ELSE IS TO BLAME.