All In It Together

The poor, put-upon City is feeling hard done by again. The recently revived corpse of Vincent Cable has brutally dismissed the banking sector's argument that tighter regulation should be postponed until the economy has recovered and the banking sector can argue that because the economy has recovered there is no need for tighter regulation. Should the Government fail to adopt a degree of stringency which they consider appropriate, Barclays and HSBC have hinted that they might even emigrate, so that the next time we needed a recession there'd be nobody to cause it but the chancellor.

Daveybloke, whose government has spent fifteen months throwing people out of work and sitting by with an indulgent smirk while the chums have a rah-rah on the stock exchange, has hinted that he would prefer to avoid "taking risks that put the economy at risk". As everyone knows by now, our present economic difficulties are largely the fault of the National Health Service and excessively low student fees; hence the Conservatives are content to wait until after the next election before doing anything much about the banks, and George the Progressively Regressive would be happy to leave the whole matter until 2019 or, in Standard English, until Henley freezes over. However his Liberal Democrat strategists claim (or "believe", according to the Guardian's psychic correspondent) that "significant reforms" will require extensive lip-service between now and 2015 in order to avoid accusations that the Government did nearly as little as the last one to deal with the banking problem.