Elections: "Light Touch Financial Regulation"

In case any British Voters who have lost their jobs, are wondering how the UK came to end up in such a stupendous mess, I provide this reminder of Gordon Browns speech to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in 2005.

Now he is casting about to lay the blame on the Americans (without naming them out loud), and certainly is not accepting his role in the UK's problems. However as recently as 2005, he was not so shy, and was still a New Labour neo-liberalist, praising light touch free enterprise, free markets, and world globalisation.

Back then, he discussed the financial market regulation by describing it thus "the old regulatory model – and for more than one hundred years – the implicit principle from health and safety to the administration of tax and financial services has been, irrespective of known risks or past results, 100 per cent inspection whether it be premises, procedures or practices"

He then went on to promise deregulation, based upon a “new risk based model of regulation” for financial services with “no inspection without justification, no form filling without justification, and no information requirements without justification, not just a light touch but a limited touch.”

He then went on to add that "my aim for Britain has been to maintain and entrench our hard won economic stability. And I believe that if we now make the right long term decisions, founded upon that stability, Britain is well suited to be one of the great successes of this new global era....... [in the past] Britain first in, last out, worst hit, in world downturns."

He then went on to praise his new model of regulation based upon a 'risk based' approach "And driving further the risk based approach in financial services, I will publish at the Pre Budget Report 10 new simplification and deregulatory measures ......"

Brown was aided in his 'light touch deregulation' by his aide de camp of eight years, Ed Balls, who has also showed a recent loss of memory by declaring that those who had advocated “light touch regulation” had been, in his words, “routed”. Ed Balls was Chief Economic Adviser to the Treasury for eight years and who then boasted about the “light touch” regime of City regulation he had designed. He also, who then as a Minister called for “a light touch approach at the global and EU level”.

So when you wonder where your pain came from, don't listen to the New Labour Wimmin, ignore the opposition if you wish, but just look at the boasts of the main players, Brown and Balls, (undertakers to the British economy. est 1997).