The BBC’s ‘Wake Up to Money’ programme on 5Live finally woke up to the world and started examining the claims that the Labour government may have urged Barclays to manipulate the Libor rate.
Better late than never…and fair enough it was a rigorous interview with Andrew Sentance, former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee member, who said the Bank was “monitoring the level of Libor very closely at the height of the financial crisis”….But he said he “certainly didn’t know anything [about rate fixing].”
That was from this write up (I presume by the WUTM team)…but misses one thing Sentance said…’Nobody (in government) questioned the Libor rate.’
Now we know already that’s not true as ‘senior figures in Whitehall’ were questioning Barclays figures and reports of Libor rate fixing were in the papers….including the Wall Street Journal…out of which WUTM quoted this morning……‘Questions about Libor were raised as far back as November (2007), at a Bank of England meeting in which United Kingdom banks, the firms that process bank trades and central bank officials discussed the recent financial turmoil. According to minutes of the meeting, “several group members thought that Libor fixings had been lower than actual traded interbank rates through the period of stress.” ‘
The question has to be why has the BBC not been all over this story before now…Miliband, Labour leader, has been ranting on about it and calling for criminal prosecutions for bankers involved….and yet the possibility that in fact, the Labour government was itself involved has been ignored by the BBC….a big story surely? If Bankers should be jailed for fixing Libor should not the politicians who may have told them to do it also be locked up?
If this had been a ‘Tory scandal’ the BBC would have been speculating like mad and going over every possible scenario and pontificating about which Tory ministers would be jailed.
Miliband has had a good press all day for his speech on banking with little analysis of its content or whether in fact the policies he proposes aren’t already put underway by the Coalition.
Sheila Fogarty brought on Labour’s Chuka Umunna and someone from the New Economic Foundation…a group which is an almost anarchist economic think tank….much liked by Gordon Brown.
This is their recipe for getting us out of the financial mire that Labour left us in: ‘We must work 20 hours/week to cut CO2, materialism and have a fairer distribution of work.’
NEF was founded in 1986 by the leaders of The Other Economic Summit (TOES) with the aim of working for a “new model of wealth creation, based on equality, diversity and economic stability”.
This group has worked with the BBC and Joe Smith (of CMEP and Harrabin fame) on climate change issues and policy development.
Hardly a credible group to ask to comment on banking.
Perhaps the BBC would like to invite on Boris Johnson who reminds us that we need banks….‘Stop bashing the bankers – we have no future without them.’
The BBC reduces the argument to black and white…bankers are bad people and we need to stop them earning money…for a major news organisation to adopt an attitude so naive and simplistic and that wouldn’t look out of place on any student demo is a betrayal of all the BBC is supposed to stand for and of the viewers and listeners who rely on it for accurate and balanced information and comment….using which they base their own judgements and decisions…and voting.
I listened to this piece with Umunna and friend and it was obvious from the start that there was going to be no light played onto the subject. Complete waste of time.
What with labour ‘discovering’ a whole lotta emails which, according to John Pennar (sp?), shine the light of truth and honesty onto Balls-up.
And …
… with one mighty bound he was free.
No doubt this story, like the Millie Dowler lies, has been on the back burner for labour. They, after all, have a score to settle with Barclays over South African sanctions.
It’s starting to smell like another set up.
The BBC are now so brazen with their biased coverage it’s almost as though they are sticking two fingers up to their critics and saying, ‘So? What are you going to do about it?’ On Radio 4 in particular they have gone beyond not mentioning Labour whenever something dodgy they might be implicated in is going on, to spinning some new Miliband/Balls initiative that portrays them in a positive light as the only people who can solve the problem – their new ‘policy’ for reforming the banks, miraculously produced out of a hat whilst the Libor scandal has been gathering pace, is a prime example.
All endorsed, of course, by inviting on their leftie/Marxist cronies from the world of think tanks, quangos and ‘charities’ with their authoritative-sounding titles who the average Joe can’t be bothered to look up because he trusts his Auntie Beeb ‘to get it about right’.
Indefensible, shameless bias with more than a hint of the sinister.
And don’t forget that during all the bailouts Labour, despite their best efforts, could not get Barclays to place themselves in hock to them because Barclays insisted on raising the finances they needed from elsewhere. That is something else Labour have against Barclays, they would not play ball with Labours back door Bank Nationalisations.
I know the NEF well from the early 90s, when they were the financial equivalent of Greenpeace or FoE.
A few serious academics surrounded by agitprop lefties who`d put the bricks through The Mans windows on their behalf.
Over the years they are now the new consensus-advising Government and still railing at the Man, at one and the same time.
Unaccountable grievance hustlers who live off quango grants from the loopy left in academe….charities relying on the EU to prime their “research”…and, of course; the darlings of the BBC/Guardian Gordian Nut that fuesl this countrys agenda via the Beeb.
Asking the NEF to discuss rational ways out of the financial mess is a s obviously stupid as asking a “comedian and his fridge” why Andy Murray didn`t win Wimbledon yesterday…at peak time on the BBCs current affairs flagship….now THAT would never happen..would it?
The BBC just phones it in these days….there`s no news if there`s not an Lefty ishoo to peddle or a Tory to shaft…hence Tony Hawks on Today this morning….
A more accurate name would be,
Wake Up To Money Realise It’s Wake Up To Money And Switch It Off.
Mickey Clarke is a nice enough chap but out of his depth.
Verity is a pretrendy leftie super-annuated student grant agit-prop shouter droid whose knowledge of finance you could write on the back of a postage stamp.
“Tucker’s down on his luck”
http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/politics/2012/july/tuckers-down-on-his-luck
In light of the “evidence” presented in the Commons by the deputy Governor of the Bank of England, the BBC has been in full defend labour mode and they have been attacking Osborne.
Europes economic woes is down solely to our failure to admit Turkey into the EU.
http://islamversuseurope.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/europes-economic-woes-explained-no.html
Another black hole down which to pour our hard earned money. Keep the Turks well away from EU .
It’s bad enough already we dont want 80 million Turks with unfettered access across a borderless EU
Labour’s problem is this: If their minsters were interfering with the Libor rate then they should be prosecuted as Miliband says, but if (as the BBC seem to imply for them) they were deliberately not getting involved with the most important aspect of the economy – then they are incompetent and should be debarred from fighting elections until they know what good government actually is.