Who should carry the can for the bank run?
11:12am
If you’re trying to figure out who should be blamed for the whole Northern Rock debacle, do read Martin Vander Weyer’s column today. As Martin argues, Northern Rock is in large part responsible for the mess it got itself into to while the Financial Services Authority also deserves blame for sitting on its hands after it became aware of the potential problem. But the crisis has also demonstrated that the regulatory system that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling set up in 1997 is not fit for purpose.
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hogarth zombie
September 21st, 2007 4:23pm Report this commentthis is a really big question. Do the public care what Gordon did before he became PM? If they do, Cam has a chance. If they don't....uh-oh
David Lindsay
September 22nd, 2007 12:15pm Report this commentThursday night's 'Mock The Week' would more appropriately have been called 'Mock The Old' or 'Mock The North', since it featured people who either were or thought that they were young, and who had decided to have a field day about Northern Rock's investors "wandering around Northern town centres with tartan trolley-bags full of cash" and what have you, from variously faux-Cockney, ever so Home Counties, gentrified West Country, Glaswegian, and Irish vantage points. How the London student audience roared with laughter! Well, those people worked for a living, and some of them still do. In their tartan trolley-bags are your enormous debts, which have given you the lifestyle that you think is owed to you by the world in general and by the lower orders in particular. It is high time that someone looked into just how much flashy Southern and/or middle-class credit is dependent on discreet Northern and/or working-class thrift. And, of course, gilded youth is only gilded at the expense of middle and old age. So why doesn't anyone ever point out this fact? As Janet Street-Porter said on Question Time, we are beginning to realise that there are two Britains, the Britain that borrows and the Britain that saves. The latter pays for the former, so the former should show some respect.
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