The Blame Game

Here's a thing: it turns out there's some dirty goings out taking place in the City. Who'd have thunk it? There seems to be an attitude amongst our great financial institutions that just as they are too big to fail, they are also too big to not cheat.

Since the 'Crash' rogue deals seems to have popped up on a semi-regular basis. One would start to think that there is a cultural problem amongst companies based in the Square Mile.

However that's just a sarcastic introduction to what I really wanted to talk about, which is the blame game. Obviously whenever something like this happens our esteemed political leaders like to shout a lot at each other & blame anyone but themselves. It's happening now in the House of Commons as we speak.

And whilst the shit hit the fan on this one whilst the Tories are in power the seeds of it were sown...well..a long time ago. Just as our politicians became too close to Rupert Murdoch and News International so to have our politicians been hypnotized by the bling, bling, bling of the City of London.

The consensus emerged - and Osborne likes to pretend he didn't believe this, but he did - that a light touch was needed to regulate the City of London. It was too big a part of the economy and in a competitive landscape no one wanted to rock the boat too much. Even after the 'Crisis' not much changed. The rhetoric became nastier and bonuses became a bigger issue but apart from that the City seems to carry on as before. Bob Diamond himself felt that they'd been given enough of a kicking and unwisely decided to say so.

But here we are again.

The Labour Party had thirteen years in government but they too got caught up in the web. LIBOR could have been regulated then, but it wasn't. Osborne chose not to regulate it in the last Finance Act. No one comes out of this looking good, which is why I'd like Ed Miliband to take a more mature stance than the usual political one and say something along the lines of...

"It's obvious banking regulation needs to be properly reviewed. None of us come out of this looking good. We failed to act when we had the chance. We all got too close to the City of London. Like it or not the City is a significant chunk of the UK economy but perhaps both we and the party opposite have become over-enamoured of it to the expense of other parts of the economy. Happy to continue with the light touch of regulation we all made a mistake. I therefore propose that all the parties work together to find a new consensus. That instead of trying to pin the blame on each other we put our heads together to find the right solution."

That might be a better use of everyone's time. And money.

But I suspect we'll just get the usual blame game followed by cosmetic changes & another 'rogue' in a few months time.