Rumours are coming back from the G7 meeting at the weekend. Well placed rumours.
These suggest there is just one obstacle left in the path of global economic reform. One country alone that is saying 'no' to all the necessary changes to create transparency, enhance regulation, crack open the tax havens and ensure that there is international cooperation to build a better future.
Yes, you've guessed it; it's the UK.
Staggering isn't it? Brown and his team are so wedded to finance that they alone are still putting its needs above those of the rest of us on this planet.
It comes to something when I have to ask myself if the Tories could be this bad.
It's sad that I have to conclude that the likely answer to that is 'yes'.
This is the UK's current gift to the world: London, the last bastion of the Washington consensus.
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[…] notice the veiled appeal to government to ensure financial services keep chugging along? No wonder Richard Murphy tears government a new one on its foot dragging performance at the G7. Like Richard, I find it astonishing that government […]
And where’s the financial regulation? – still nothing. Brown is still clinging to the neoliberal model, from which, to this point, UK policy has not yet deviated in any way.
I have just attended a presentation by the Director of NIESR on financial services, the importance of these to the economy and what happens when they goes wrong. It was a joint NIESR and National Audit Office presentation, and almost the whole of the audience were from govt depts.
Yet for all the ho ho ho wise after teh event, no one spoke of, or questioned the fact, that there is STILL no regulation.
Even more seriously, the govt’s answered to a Parliamentary question showed its keen intention to try to psuh through a WTO Trade in Services deal (GATS), which includes a commitment to set financial services DEREGULATION into stone.
Dangerous stuff indeed.
And this is why the ‘Green New Deal’ is incomplete and thus useless, if it does not take account of this agenda running alongside the govt’s phoney rhetoric; indeed, without a more sophisticated awareness, the GND itself represents another load of phoney rhetoric, equally guilty of misleading the public.
Time to grow up.