In some ways, over the last decades or more, the wishes of the individual have taken precedence over the welfare of the majority, generally due to personal greed and self-aggrandizement of a relatively few. Just for a second let us just take sport. Our regional teams in practically every professional sport are chock-a-block with foreigners. There is not a shadow of doubt the man on the terraces wants to see the best players, but then they are sick as ducks when the national side doesn’t come up to their expectations. The same thing is happening in industry, individuals are taking their manufacturing overseas, where it will be produced, even including transport, for a lot less than being manufactured here. The end result is exactly the same as with sport, there is no training ground to bring on our youth with the skills essential for manufacturing. For years I have not understood why we allowed our manufacturing ability to be downgraded year-by-year, when for centuries it has been the backbone of our wealth in this country. We were told, if we questioned it, that the financial markets were where our wealth lay, which was ultimately proved to be wrong.
What is there about the banking system, which enables it to function without the normal responses that other commercial undertakings have to endure? If Joe Bogs down the road gets into difficulties either through his own fault, or because the banks won’t let him money, the government doesn’t turn round, pat him on the head, and tell him to do better, and also pull him out of his mess, at our expense, no! He is hung out to dry. So what is there about banking that allows them, presumably, to take my money that I have invested in the bank and play a big boys game of Monopoly, totally unsupervised, and when the wheels come off, and champagne and fast cars might be a thing of the past, there is a fair chance that they will not starve, because they’re professionals, and will have taken care of that eventuality? The big bosses of course have to maintain their style, and it would seem that they were unaffected, instead of like poor Joe Blogs, who has gone to the wall.
I just wonder if this Consortium Government will have the same policies that the last one had with respect to banking. I find it ludicrous that several of the banks who are holding my savings, and presumably fairly strapped for cash, can afford to sponsor sport in a way that they do. I was watching cricket, a very poor quality of cricket, playing limited over matches, to stadiums which were very poorly supported, I wondered how they were managing to do this, when the interest they were paying seems to be abysmal, and the excuse is, of course, the credit crunch, and who brought that about?