The guilty men, and not a banker among them

The billions put into the banks to stave off catastrophe will eventually come back to the taxpayer. It will take some time, but the nationalised banks will one day be re-privatised, probably at a profit. Taxpayer subventions to the others will come back in by way of insurance premiums, taxes and other instruments. How much any final net loss from the bank bail-out will be, should there be any loss at all, is hard to calculate. It does not worry the money markets over-much. They know very well that the banking crisis, though acute and dangerous, is passing and that it will end eventually, with some sort of equilibrium restored.

So let us stop wasting time on Fred the Shred and his paltry millions. Fred is merely a distraction from a far more dangerous problem, a distraction peddled by the Labour Party and the usual leftie suspects for whom bashing the nearest capitalist is de rigeur. It's fun. Well, it gets a cheap laugh on Mock the Week and is a lot easier than actually thinking. No, let us keep our eye on the ball and go after the real bad guys, those who have robbed us of hundreds of billions, impoverished our children and their children, and deliberately sowed the seeds of pain and distress for the innocent and of historic social disaster in this country, for their own malign reasons. The structural deficit is really frightening. And never forget that it was created by this Labour government, and that it preceded the banking crisis. It has absolutely nothing to do with banks. It is the structural deficit which is panicking the international money markets whose withdrawal from the UK, if it should happen, would send our interest rates sky high, devastate our commerce and industry, put rockets under householders’ mortgages and credit card balances, and cause unemployment and real hardship on a scale we have not seen since the Jarrow Marches. If this should happen, where would the money come from to pay mass unemployment benefit and fund support for the poor, the old and the sick? There would be no money. We no longer earn money as a country – we borrow it. And the moneylenders would turn their back on us. There would be no money. Britain would have become Cuba. And then what? You may well ask. Ask, too, why we have had so many repressive laws installed since Labour came to power. That is the risk this country faces, thanks solely to Gordon Brown. Gordon Brown, who seriously expects the country to give him and his henchmen five more years in the offices from which he, with their support and that of his sycophantic friends in the press, not all of them with benign intent, has caused Britain such terrible damage that we face almost unthinkable troubles in the years ahead – regardless of which party is in government. The nation’s plight is entirely the result of Gordon Brown’s spending vastly more than the government earned, year after year after year after year, and borrowing on the international money markets to cover the shortfall, claiming that he had abolished the 'bust' part of boom-and-bust. This is the insane vanity of the major criminal through the ages – like the Godfather, a megalomaniac contemptuous of the rules governing everyone else’s behaviour.

The money markets whose largesse is the British economy’s life-support machine, for now, are staying their collective hand until the election, in the hope that Brown will be so destroyed that he and his party will not be able to get their hands on the levers of the British economy for at least a generation. (IMF jobs for Gordon and Ed? Erm, I don’t think so.) If Labour loses it will comfort the markets and they will give Britain a bit more leeway. But not much. If Labour should win the election, economic catastrophe will strike within days. The money markets know that the real problem for the British economy under the Greatest Chancellor in British History, Saviour of the World, etc., is, in fact, the Greatest Chancellor in British History, Saviour of the World etc. Gordon Brown has probably been the worst finance minister in the western world, ever. Ever. He has saddled Britain with a spiralling government deficit so vicious that it’s anyone’s guess whether it can ever be reduced. Ever. But the reduction must be attempted and the attempt will be extremely painful. If we are to avoid the sort of actual ruin of lives envisaged above, lots of things we are accustomed to have free of charge will no longer be free. Salaries, wages and pensions will be substantially cut. Taxes will rise. Unemployment will rise although not as much as if the medicine were not administered. Looking on the bright side, services will be threatened. Trains will not run. Bob Crowe will think it’s Christmas all year. The unions will riot on the streets. Billy Bragg will write anthems which will echo off the walls of Whitehall as Leninspart and the Comrades address mass meetings in Trafalgar Square. Rocks will be hurled through plate glass windows. People will get hurt. After the election, the money market’s best guess as to the viability of Britain as a candidate for its lending will change from time to time. They will watch closely as the poor bastards who succeed Brown-Darling at the Treasury try to stave off near-chaos as they set about cleaning up the unbelievable shite left behind by immoral Gordon Brown’s immoral government, which has not only beaten all Labour’s previous records for damaging, delusional economic incompetence, but has pursued a merciless scorched-earth policy in its dying months in order to saddle the next government with unprecedented and (Brown hopes) intractable problems.

In addition, Labour has carefully ‘invested’ billions of our money on quangoid braking mechanisms staffed by Labour-supporting obstructionists who, whatever the cost to us – the taxpayers, the electorate – will strain every sinew to thwart the Conservative government. And sod democracy. Fuck the great, unwashed electorate. This is not about economics. This is not about democracy. This is not even, in the last analysis, about the man Gordon Brown. It is about his dogma. It is about power. Labour in power. Gordon Brown plans to regain power at the next election but one. If not him, personally, then his creatures, Balls and Cooper. In the meantime, Brown will relish opposing David Cameron, his class enemy. He will love every minute at the Opposition Despatch Box as much as he has hated every minute at the Treasury Despatch Box, believing it impertinent for anyone, let alone an Etonian Tory, to challenge him, the Leader of the Labour Party. Brown is a zealot, a puritan. He is not human enough to relish the trappings of power. Only the power itself. If this country should ever re-elect that man or any of his evil, cold-blooded gang to office, it will have abandoned all reason and will deserve the sort of nightmare which can only end with a deep draught of Kool-Aid.