Biased BBC’s Alan notes
“As you know the BBC had Mervyn King do a speech for them last night but seem rather shy about revealing some the contents so far…
Mervyn King in a speech for the BBC Today programme states that because Labour’s economic policies and failure to control the banks we have lost 1 million jobs in the UK.
The Telegraph has a report here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9242161/Labour-lost-a-million-jobs-says-Bank-chief.html
The BBC website hides the high profile speech on the politics page and fails to mention Labour losing us 1 million jobs but does blame King for the recession and states that ‘He also admitted the BoE should have done more to avert the banking crisis.’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17929120
The BBC then bring on Labour’s pet economist who writes for the New Statesman and the Guardian promoting Labour’s policy of more borrowing and spending ……
‘However, David Blanchflower, a former member of the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee, accused Sir Mervyn of being “disingenuous”.
“If Mervyn King had thought more regulation was important he could’ve done something about it. And because he didn’t he must take responsibility for the fact the Bank of England missed the biggest financial crisis in a century,” he told BBC Radio 5 live.’
What did King say?
‘So why, you might ask, did the Bank of England not do more to prevent the disaster? We should have. But the power to regulate banks had been taken away from us in 1997. Our power was limited to that of publishing reports and preaching sermons.
With the benefit of hindsight, we should have shouted from the rooftops that a system had been built in which banks were too important to fail, that banks had grown too quickly and borrowed too much, and that so-called ‘light-touch’ regulation hadn’t prevented any of this.
From the beginning of 2008, we at the Bank of England began to argue that UK banks needed extra capital – a lot of extra capital, possibly £100 billion or more. It wasn’t a popular message. But nine months later, market pressure forced banks to raise new capital or accept it from the state. UK tax payers ended up owning large portions of two of our four biggest banks, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds TSB, but almost all banks would have failed had not taxpayer support been extended. That bold action in October 2008 could have happened sooner.
Bailing out the banks came too late though to prevent the financial crisis from spilling over into the world economy.
Over 25 million jobs disappeared worldwide. And unemployment in Britain rose by over a million.’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9718000/9718062.stm
Couldn’t be much clearer even in diplomatic speak….power to regulate the banks was taken away from the BoE by Labour in 1997, Brown’s ‘light touch’ regulation failed to control the banks, the BoE warned Brown from the start of 2008 to pump capital into the banks, a warning which was ignored, and that Labour’s failure to control the economy cost over 1 million jobs.
Astonishing cover up for Brown who fails to get a name check. This is a speech commissioned by the BBC itself, for its most prestigious political news programme ‘Today’ and yet the story is buried on the ‘back pages’ and anything detrimental to Labour removed or ‘neutralised’ by an opposing voice.
It is a sure bet that if King had said Osborne must change tack and adopt the mythical ‘Plan B’ it would be front page news. Labour does not need large political donations to fund its campaigns when it has the taxpayer funding its propaganda arm through the BBC license fee.
