Michael Dean : Weblog items tagged with credit crunch

IF Brown could have run the UK better then he would have done!

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 12:47:02 GMT

Amazing how many people are prepared to state what Cameron and the Conservatives are going to do next. Some sort of gift of prophecy?

Yet they forget all that Brown and New Labour have actually done, stuff that is all documented, it is in fact history.

How can anyone expect Brown and the rest of New Labour to do anything different than they have already done.

We have a major financial meltdown in progress. We are going to be taxed to the hilt and beyond just to pay the huge debts we have incurred. The UK economy now is almost on the same level as Greece!

IF Brown and New Labour could have run the UK better than they have managed to do, then I would suggest that they would have done better.
What we have seen in the financial meltdown is the best that Brown and New Labour can manage to do!

Their best is nowhere near good enough. That is why they should be out of power ASAP.

Banks win overdraft charges court case

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:49:48 GMT

This court case was never addressing the main issue.

It is not the principle of having penalties for going overdrawn, it is the AMOUNT of penalty that these greedy and grasping banks are taking.

The very concept of a FIXED penalty is the problem. These penalties are set up to penalise the poorest and weakest in our society.

This incompetent Labour government did a huge amount of damage by closing post offices and forcing many people to have benefits, pensions etc paid into bank accounts. They did not understand the consequences of this action, all they could see were cost saving!

People on low incomes should NOT be forced to have a bank account. They are the least able to manage bank accounts and the ones who suffer the most when things go wrong.

Many elderly, sick and low paid workers only have £50 a week available to pay ALL their bills. The moment they get charged £30 plus, their accounts go out of control and they end up owing the banks hundreds of pounds.

Penalty charges MUST be PROPORTIONAL to income.

We cannot have a situation where the money paid to the poorest people in our society and which they need to live on is taken by the banks to increase their profits and add to the bonuses paid to the senior staff!!

Our prime minister did not bother listening to those who forecast exactly what would happen if the government persisted in forcing people to open bank accounts. Gordon Brown made the wrong decision, as usual, and the poorest people in the UK are the ones who are hit the hardest!

Brown and Afghanistan exit strategies

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:54:56 GMT

It would seem obvious from the latest comments from Brown that he has finally understood that this war in the Middle East is wrong, was wrong from day one, that we cannot win and more and more of our soldiers will be killed or injured.

I was taken in by Blair (at first) when he claimed that we had to attack Iraq or they would attack us.

It wasn't the quality of his argument, it was that it simply did not occur to me that the prime minister of this country would lie to us about the potential threat by another country!

Fortunately I realised quite quickly that everything blair was saying was rubbish and I have not believed a word he has said since!

But Brown has kept us in this war, even subsequently attacking Afghanistan. He has failed to justify the war, giving differing reasons why we need to be in Afghanistan.

Now Brown appears to have changed his mind and is working on exit strategies (which can be seen as meaning that the reasons we are at war were not that important after all!).

So what has changed to mean that Brown is now not firmly sticking to his stated position that this war is important to the UK?

I would suggest that nothing has changed. Except that we have an election coming up soon and Brown knows that he is not popular!

All that money wasted in these wars, let alone the lives lost and the lives blighted by injuries. We have an election coming up and Gordon Brown is changing his priorities!

Are New Labour competent to govern?

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:22:31 GMT

I have a fairly low opinion of the competency of New Labour and their leaders.

But the way that our leadership run the country affects so many people, in same cases the consequences are awful.

One of Gordon Brown's personal statements on what he was going to do to help families who were having problems paying their mortgage was to introduce the Mortgage Rescue Scheme. This was a key announcement by Brown and it was intended to show how he was able to respond to the needs of people who were likely to lose their homes because of the recession.

It took time for the scheme to come into effect, during which many people would have had their homes repossessed!

But we now find that the number of people that the scheme has helped in England is 15. It is good that 15 families have been helped but what about all the other families who have had their homes repossessed?

15 families helped! In Scotland it is around 1000 families, in Wales it is 70 families.

There were 11,400 repossessions between April and June. Yet this grandly announced scheme of Gordon Brown has only helped 15 families!

Is this just incompetence by our government? Or are they only interested in saving the banking system?

Perhaps the officials involved in awarding certificates showing that school kids are able to catch a bus, should have been spending their time on the Mortgage Rescue Scheme!

the banks are not lending!

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:19:40 GMT

Just watching a discussion on tv.

I hope that Labour MP, Angela Eagle carries on fronting the Labour attempts to justify it's actions and get back in power! In my view, she (and her leader Brown) are helping the Conservative cause and doing Labour harm. Which is good!

She was saying that the banks should be lending money to get the economy going. But (almost) everybody in the UK knows that the government (the one that she is a minister in) has told the banks to build up liquidity and they are doing this rather than financing the businesses and the mortgages of the UK!

We all know that, the banks know that, the businesses know that.

So why does Eagle not seem to know that when she talks about the banks financing businesses and house loans.

I also like the way that Labour, particularly Brown and Eagle on tv tonight, blame the credit crunch for the financial problems. They seem to forget that Brown was in charge of regulating the financial industry in the years before it went belly up with a severe case of bad loans!

The fact that the US and other countries had similar problems does not let New Labour off the hook in the UK. Their actions (or inactions!) allowed the credit crunch to hit the UK severely.

So it is a severe case of hypocrisy to blame the credit crunch for the UK's problems!!!!!

Tax on you and all your houses!

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:32:00 GMT

What are New Labour proposing?

The Mail on Sunday has details of a new tax on anyone who lives in a house, unless there are no redeeming features at all of the house or the view from the house!

William III introduced a window tax in 1696 . Glass was the equivalent of a good view or local amenities, but the principle is the same.

Charles Stuart II introduced a Hearth or Fireplace Tax in 1662. The tax had to be paid for each fireplace in a property.

The significance of this new New Labour tax is that it is not based on absolutes, At least the Kings of old actually taxed something that was useful to the householder!

You may not like the view from your house. You may be fed up with the bus stop outside your gate because of the noise at night and the mess left around your gate. But you will still have to pay this tax!

We already pay council tax on our poperties, the amount paid depends upon the value of the propety in question. But the factors that determine the value of a house include the size of the house, the area the house is in, the views from the house, the presence of patios and conservatories, garages and the availability of parking.

In fact the new envy tax from New Labour is based on many of the factors that establish the council tax band.

This is a second tax on top of the council. We are being taxed TWICE for the same property assets!

No wonder New Labour like this tax! Right down their street!

The recession - is the cure worse than the disease?

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:57:29 GMT

So the UK gets a recession which was allowed to happen by this lamentable government with it’s complete failure to regulate the financial industry in a proper manner!

Of course, our government knows how to get us out of recession! Borrow, borrow and borrow and use the money, mainly, to take public ownership of the UK banks and building societies who got themselves and the UK into trouble!

The Conservatives said that this was the wrong thing to do! But they are not in power at this time so there was not a lot they could do. (But Brown still rubbished the Conservative’s lack of plans to get the UK out of recession.)

Now Brown and New Labour have to justify to the people of the UK the debt levels that they have built up. These debt levels are not insubstantial! The total aamount of UK debt is £799 billion(56.6% of UK GDP).

This debt amounts to an average of £13,000 per person in the UK. What is staggering about this is that each person in the UK has to pay £13,000 of tax in order to clear that debt.

And it must not be forgotten that interest accrues on this debt. The longer it takes to pay off, the higher the amount due to be paid!

And this the background which Brown claims that there will be no tax cuts in public services!

So how desperate is the UK economy then?

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 15:20:17 GMT

The state of the UK economy is highlighted in the latest desperate move of this Labour government to save money!

I cannot see any justification for the latest desperate action by Gordon Brown to get some money by cutting compensation payments for the vicitims of violent crime. Linking these cuts to those who have committed driving offences in the previous five years just makes the whole situation worse!

What planet are these people on? Of course Brown has approved this method of clawing money back from those who really do deserve it. They wouldn’t have done it without his permission! Or is he not of much importance in this government any more? Perhaps others are running the ship and Brown is just a figurehead?

The Conservatives have called this attack on people who have suffered violent crime ’revolting’. They are right.

Brown and 'there are enough helicopters'

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 22:37:28 GMT

I heard Gordon Brown during PMQs going on about there being enough helicopters for the troops in Afghanistan.

Mr Brown said

it was "absolutely clear" the heavy loss of life in recent weeks was not due to a lack of helicopters.

How can this be 'absolutely clear' ?? It isn't possible to know. They didn't have helicopters available so we don't know.

But one could imagine that helicopters with thermal imaging could have detected the enemy troops before our soldiers got caught in an ambush.

One could image that gunfire from a helicopter could have kept the enemies heads down or even killed the enemy combatants without hand to hand fighting being involved.

Readers of this blog will know that I have campaigned against the use of snatch landrovers when the enemies main weapons are bombs. I have to question how many times a helicopter would have been used instead of a road journey if helicopters had been available!

In PMQs Brown was mixing current tense and future tense, such as

'yes we have enough helicopters for our troops, new ones are being delivered after modifications are made'

In the way I use the English language this means 'no we don't have enough but we have ordered some and they will be available in the future'.

Darling acknowledges failure of bank regulation

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:51:03 GMT

Alistair Darling announced Labour's plans for a new council to oversee the ativities of the Treasury, the FSA and the Bank of England. But he has kept the current system of regulation.

In the House of Commons, Darling said that financial institutions needed to be better managed. But he and Brown were the the people responsible for managing the financial services to prevent anything like the Credit Crunch from happening!!!!

Why was this announced when Brown was out of the country at the G8 meeting? He was actually the man in charge throughout the, first as chancellor and then as PM. Surely he should have been the person to announce the government's plans to control the financial institutions? Or doesn't he like owning up to getting things wrong!

Darling added, "We need a change of culture in the banks and their boardrooms, with pay practices that are focused on long-term stability, and not on short-term profit". Does he mean that in the last 10 years there has been no long-term stability and that the focus was on short-term profit?

Shadow chancellor George Osborne said the Conservatives would abolish the current system and give supervision powers to the Bank of England.

I liked the response of the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable. He said 'This is not so much a White Paper as a blank paper'.