Man in a Shed: Conflict of intrest

Monday, March 10, 2008

Labour to be run by Finance !

Apparently the Labour party has just appointed David Pitt-Watson as the new general secretary of the Labour Party.

Get this: Mr Pitt-Watson is a financier in the City who is chairman of Hermes Equity Ownership Service which is a major shareholder in Northern Rock. !

Can you think any of the bothers know what a conflict of interest is ? Or maybe they're just to desperate for cash, but then that's why they need a new general secretary anyway.

There is an interesting relationship between Labour and some financiers in the city that hasn't been adequately explored or explained. I've heard hints from people who work in that area, but no quotable specifics. The, until very recently, favourable legislative climate for such institutions must surely be a coincidence.

Update: Guido has more details - including the privately educated Oxford graduates doination to the "Only Gordon" Labour party coronation campaign here...

Update: See Phillip Blond's comments in the First Post on Labour's love of the uber rich and hedge fund managers.

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman