Blame game

Iain Dale is running a thread about Brown's hypocrisy in the matter of bank regulation. Against Brown's present day claims to be the prophet of World Salvation Regulation, Dale cites Brown's speech to the CBI Conference in 2005:

The better, and in my opinion the correct, modern model of regulation – the risk based approach - is based on trust in the responsible company, the engaged employee and the educated consumer, leading government to focus its attention where it should: no inspection without justification, no form filling without justification, and no information requirements without justification, not just a light touch but a limited touch. The new model of regulation can be applied not just to regulation of environment, health and safety and social standards but is being applied to other areas vital to the success of British business: to the regulation of financial services and indeed to the administration of tax. And more than that, we should not only apply the concept of risk to the enforcement of regulation, but also to the design and indeed to the decision as to whether to regulate at all.

Yes, well.

There follows some of the usual Labour yah-boo about what the wicked Tories have said and not said, would have done or not done.

So here we go, then.

Never mind what the Opposition has said or done. Brown, cheered on by his (variously) stupid, venal, compliant and principle-free back-benches, was and is the man. He has been running the economy solo since 1997.

It is Brown’s decisions that have given us these consequences – no-one else’s – and he has to take the blame. Tough? Certainly, but ‘tough’ comes in the Top Job’s pay-packet along with the tremendous power, the red carpets around the world and your place in History. (Shame about that, Gordon.)

Brown knew it would be tough when he applied for the job, and all during the long years when he was gagging for power, and when he was mercilessly attacking those who had it, in exactly the same terms by which he is under attack now. Heat, kitchen... Tough.

Brown, the excited new broom, buggered the regulatory status quo ante to stamp his authority on a group of people whom he has spent his whole life hating: capitalist bankers. He did it because now he could, and because he did not understand it, and because he did not know that he did not understand it. It is inconceivable to this vain man that there is anything that he does not understand. Added to which, he would not have cared if he had known. One only has to watch his contorted face at PMQs to see vanity living with venom.

Brown came to power after a lifetime of bitter hatred of the City’s sophisticated procedures because they were not of his making and because they occupied a critical position in the economy which he would now dominate as his personal fiefdom. Well, he got what he wanted– and he still has it, eh, Darling? Chickens, roost… suck it up, Gordon.

He has behaved like a spoilt and wilful child, smashing up his rival’s toys without rebuke from anyone, and by anyone I mean those who knew better: the fat cats (Myners, Fred, the Baroness…). They were all happy to prostrate (prostitute?) themselves before the Great Gordon, thereby collecting their vast pay packages along with their knighthoods and peerages. The bankers scratched Gordon’s back and he scratched theirs. (Ironic, eh, in a Labour – a Labour – prime minister?) It mattered little to them that he was in it for the bile – oh, and the taxes. They are as richly deserving of a place in the stocks as he is. They were on his winning team for a long time. Now they are losing and the crowd is throwing things. Well, tough. Again.

Not that that any of this is consolation to us who, after a lifetime of hard work, thrift and independence, will have to live with poverty and dependence in our looming old age, and all because this dangerously vain and ignorant man acquired and abused such great power. All we have left is our invective, which in my own case I will direct at Brown’s hateful, destructive class-war alma mater, the Labour Party, for as long as I have strength to write.