In a remarkable version of hindsight, Gordon Brown now feels that the Bankers who lied and manipulated the global financial crisis in 2008 should have been arrested. In a new extract from his memoirs, the former Labour prime minister has all but admitted that the UK government's failures to take financial misconduct seriously enough had led to banker's taking inappropriate risks as the payoffs were high and losses did not truly affect them.
The Gordon Brown Memoirs
In his memoirs, Gordon Brown states,“If bankers who act fraudulently are not put in Jail with their bonuses returned, assets confiscated and banned from future practice, we will only give a green light to similar risk-laden behaviour in new forms.” In this single extract, we can see the whole reason for the failure of the banking industry and the sub-prime mortgage issues.
No one properly took bankers to task for their risky dealings.
Brown although a new prime minister when the financial crisis struck in mid-2007 had been the UK's chancellor for a decade. It can, therefore, be safely assumed that he should have known what was happening in the banking sector. His policy of lassiez-faire perhaps as much to blame as the bankers. Could his revelation that the bankers should have been jailed be no more than an exercise in revising history to look favourably on him? He had all the tools available to him to shore up the financial sector but did not use them.
The Fred Godwin Effect
In the extract of his memoirs that were released, he also talks about Fred Goodwin. Perhaps another easy target, bankers and Fred Goodwin are not people for whom the general British public will have much time or care for.
People who can easily be attacked to help assuage the guilt Brown feels for his role in the financial downturn. He believes it is right the Goodwin should have lost his knighthood but he also feels the Goodwin should have been stripped of bonus payments and the ability to be a company director.
These are all laws that Labour could have enacted in their years of power but did not see fit to do so.
We now have an attack on a man, who rightfully needs to be held to account for his actions, but it smacks of blame him and not me. The old the big boys did it and ran away argument.
The old Tory argument
He then goes on to attack the Conservative Party for being lenient on the bankers since they took over the UK government in 2010.
That though is 3 years after Brown could have worked to have begun the law changes that would have been needed in order to bring the financial sector under tougher scrutiny.
He blames the Conservatives for not acting out their election manifesto promise of bringing the finance industry to task. Again we have another shot at what looks like avoiding his role in the financial crisis and trying to pass the blame on to others, even if he is correct that there should be more legislation against the finance industry.
We have then the blame for the Conservatives allowing the "too big to fail" banks being allowed to grow. Brown, however, bought the banks out and had them under public ownership, it could have been stipulated then that they were broken up into smaller pieces but again they never were.
Brown should leave the spin of New Labour behind and move forward and not try and lessen his role in the issues of the past.
