OUR BANKS ARE BACK IN PROFIT AT LAST. You would think that this was a cause for much celebration; but no, there is an air of old fashioned class politics in the way it has been presented by much of the media. RSB, Lloyds TSB, HSBC and Barclays, have all announced profits amounting to billions in total; but you would think this was comparable to the disastrous collapse in the banking system which had to be bailed out by the taxpayer.
Bankers, and city speculators who drive the economy are the modern pariahs because of the bonuses they earn – yes earn in most cases. For the profits they make for their financial houses are taxed by the government to the tune of many billions. Indeed, I would bet that corporation taxation, coupled with what the city hands over to the Internal Revenue Service each year, compares favourably with the contributions every employee has to pay.
Profits still anger people. Not the traditional Lefties who carry ancestral chips around with them, but also ordinary small ‘c’ conservative types like the average Daily Mail and Telegraph reader. Perhaps they feel they have cause to complain; perhaps some of them lost money in investments. But even they must appreciate that a free market economy relies for its success upon profits. Profits which keep people in work and allows companies to expand with even more additions to the workforce.
The system works because it is the only economic system that is at ease with human nature. For it was such a nature that the small ‘c’ conservative types exploited when they invested; and if they had not done so the free market economy which relies upon them would have been in ever greater trouble.
WHAT LED TO THE BANKING CRISIS was in part due to bad lending, yet today our politicians are issuing vacuous threats to the banks if they do not lend more. These are the same wretches that accused the banks of rightly lending irresponsibly in the first place.
Now we have a banking system that takes measured decisions about lending. Sometimes these decisions will be the wrong decisions. But the bankers know that if there is ever a repeat of the last collapse within the next 10-20 years, the taxpayer will not be able to afford to bail them out. So the banks are wisely ignoring the pleas of politicians who care only about votes, and are lending at a pace dictated by probity and not politics.
If a gifted ‘speculator’ earns billions for his bank or investment house, then he deserves his bonus. If our politicians seek, in order to court popularity, to prevent such bonuses being handed out, then the talent that created the wealth will look elsewhere.
Remember, we in this country no longer have a healthy manufacturing sector to create our country’s wealth. We may have gave birth to the industrial revolution and through its manufacturing capability, gave this nation what we would call today, superpower status.
But our decline in manufacturing has been immense. It has declined to the point where a British prime minister has to go almost cap in hand to countries we once governed to tout for business.
Our one jewel in the economic crown is the city of London. It is the engine steering the whole of the British economy. If we threaten its success, in a fit of pique, by demanding that such large payouts should be stopped, then the people earning them will leave and go elsewhere: to countries that have no such prejudice against wealth creation. It is no idle threat that such talented individuals make. They are used to following the opportunity. To give an analogy the average football supporter would understand. Loyalty is only wallet deep. These people are like footballers. Their first loyalty is to themselves and their families - it is human nature in action.
WE LIVE IN A FREE MARKET ECONOMY; an economy that has provided the wealth that has created the NHS, and a free education system. Wealth is the innovator in medicine, education, defence, and all other departments of the public sector our people have shown an allegiance to.
Wealth and only wealth sustains civilisation. What we do with it is one thing; but its creation has to be permanently in the hands of a free market system where people have the incentive to achieve personnel wealth.
This so-called coalition government seems to have lost the plot. In particular the Conservative Party. This party was once the flagship of free enterprise and understood the mechanics of wealth creation. But this party’s leadership has become today nothing more than a lump of clay ready to be remoulded by the latest manifestation of the contemporary; in whatever field of cultural or political focus it emerges from.
The Conservative Party was once the anchor that kept alive British tradition. But today, the modern party is embarrassed by such a timeline. The centre ground of British politics today is like a pass the parcel at a children’s party. None of the main parties, for all their blaring-off against each other, are in anyway different from each other in the modern world and the sooner their respective activists come to terms with this the better for our democracy.
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