Devaluation

It appears that the Glorious Successor may soon have to save the world once more. The banks, which have absorbed almost forty thousand million pounds of taxpayers' money in the past few months, in return for being politely asked to start lending again, have decided they'd rather just take the cash, thank you very much. Accordingly, "options presented to the Treasury are thought to include injecting more cash into the economy and buying banks' 'toxic' assets". This used to be known as throwing good money after bad; but, as so often when faced with New Labour, the traditional forms of language tend to break down. Just as the word corruption fails to cover the blatant, contemptuous criminality of New Labour's business dealings; just as the term war crimes fails to express the casual yet cowardly mass murder which passes for New Labour foreign policy; just as the word apparatchik finds itself grovelling and drooling for mercy when applied to the likes of James Purnell, Ben Bradshaw and Randy Burnham; so the conventional terms for sheer abject paralytic ineptitude must fade into obsolescence before the actions and, especially, the inactions of Gordon and his little Darling.