| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Are the general public warming to Gordon Brown in his handling of the financial crisis? Discuss | |
| Posted by: | Fraser Pearce | |
| Date/Time: | 11/10/08 09:11:00 |
| Vanessa - When it comes to greed, how many bankers do you suppose have multi-million pound pension pots like Gordon Brown? His is bullet-proof, immune to stock market ups and downs and paid for by the good old British taxpayer - including you, me and those nasty bankers. Gordon even has the gall to expense us for his light bulbs. If you want greed then, why not look closer to home at the government that pissed over a trillion quid up the wall and saddled us with unprecedented debt (not to mention the social engineering or pissing on the Bill of Rights, Habeas Corpus and Cenotaph). If you want greed, how about looking a little closer to home at the political class, you know, the ones using ideology to protect their own privilege? The folks in Westminster voted massive pay increases for themselves in recent years, have over 90 days annual leave and now outsource 80% of the lawmaking to Brussels. You talk of “rip-off merchants who are only interested in big bucks and sod the customer”, when we have MPs being paid more than ever to do less than ever. How’s this for radical then - how about nationalising our own Parliament, so the people we vote for actually go back to regulating, legislating and governing? As for financial regulation, the FSA was granted authority by the EU, not the UK. This is all well and good until you consider that, in financial services at least, the UK’s more reliant on this sector than any other EU country. If ever there was an argument against a one-size-fits-all policy, this was it - about 20% of our GDP rested on that regulation! Then again, why go to the trouble of thinking through the consequences of bad policy when it’s easier to accuse people of being xenophobes and anti-European? So, how about nationalising the regulation and handing the power back to the Bank of England, Westminster and British government? As for the joke about putting people up against the wall, you Bourbons really seem to have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing. How about, for once, real change to work the solution rather than a reversion to the old class hatred? As for the next election “being in the bag”, a ‘none of the above’ party would win by a landslide. We need more 1776, not 1984: “...Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” |