RAPID RESPONSES
A critical state
George Osborne commented on the loss of Fred Goodwin’s knighthood by stating “RBS came to symbolise everything that went wrong in the British economy in the last decade”. This is a perplexing statement from the man charged with sorting out the public finances.
The years of artificially low interest rates that provided a huge bubble of cheap and easy credit is not a minor side story or a simple detail. Nor were the swathes of planning and employment regulations. Furthermore, surely the issuance of innumerable stealth taxes to fund an ever larger state and public sector cannot be forgotten on account of a bank that should not have been bailed out in the first place.
Osborne has not understood the cause of the financial crisis.
Amul Pandya
Chairman, I on the Future, Institute of Economic Affairs