THE GOVERNMENT has announced what it says is one of the biggest bonfires of financial regulations to allow the City of London to rule without any restraints – as the working class and middle class are savaged by rampant inflation and policed by planned draconian anti-union laws.
A package of more than 30 ‘reforms’ will allow slash and ‘cut red tape’ and ‘turbocharge growth’, entirely at the expense of the working class and the majority of the middle class.
Regulations that forced banks to legally separate retail banking from riskier ‘pirate’ investment operations are being reviewed. These regulations were introduced after the 2008 crash when Lehman Brothers went bust – and ushered in a dozen years of super austerity.
The bankers are to be given the right to gamble with the lives and at the expense of hundreds of millions of workers, in this version of capitalist freedom.
Between 2007 and 2009 the then Labour government spent £137bn of public money to bail out banks.
Overall, taxpayers have lost £36.4bn on those bailouts, according to the latest estimate.
The plans to ease regulations on financial services are being described as another ‘Big Bang’ – a reference to the deregulation of financial services by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1986.
The government has already committed to permanently scrapping a cap on bankers’ bonuses and allowing insurance companies to invest in long-term assets such as housing and windfarms to boost investment and bankers profits.
At the same time as the bankers are to be encouraged to run amok, the government is poised to bring in draconian anti-union laws that will see profit hungry bosses and bankers organising strike-breaking actions to drive down wages and drive up profits.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said the changes would secure ‘the UK’s status as one of the most open, dynamic and competitive financial services hubs in the world’. He said that the reforms ‘seize on our Brexit freedoms to deliver an agile and home-grown regulatory regime that works in the interest of British people and our businesses’.
There is no doubt that amongst the first casualties of this renewed class war will be the NHS, which will be completely smashed and its remnants ruthlessly privatised.
Chancellor Hunt, who as a former Health Secretary led the fight against the junior doctors met the bosses of the UK’s largest financial services in Edinburgh on Friday, to discuss the ‘reforms’ and the huge opportunities that will be handed to them to enrich themselves at the expense of the working class and the majority of the middle class.
After the financial crisis of 2008, when the government had to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayers money supporting the UK banking system, a new regime was brought in to increase the personal accountability of senior risk-taking staff.
It allowed for fines, bans and even custodial sentences, for these senior staff, although there have been very few examples of enforcement.
After the financial crisis, large banks were forced to separate or ‘ring fence’ their domestic banking operations – mortgages and loans for example – from their investment banking operations, which expose their own cash to market volatility and were deemed riskier.
Now all this is be ditched to recreate the ‘survival of the fittest’ and to hell with the rest. There is even a plan to develop the UK as a centre for crypto assets. This is after the recent bloodbath crash of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX.
Chris Hayward, policy chairman at the City of London Corporation, has been forced to deny what everybody else knows to be the truth, that the reforms will be brought in, in the course of the ‘race to the bottom’ to de-regulate.
It is to be savage ant-union laws for the workers, with rampant inflation destroying wage workers, while the bosses enrich themselves beyond even their lurid imaginations.
There is only one answer to this. It is that the TUC must be made to call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers government and socialism. There is not a moment to lose. Forward to the victory of the British socialist revolution!
