What to do about Bankers?

In my day job, I have worked regularly in the City for many years. As an IT specialist, I'm just the hired help but its enabled me to see first hand how the many diverse organisations that make up our financial sector operate. And of course there are good ones and not so. Many companies I work with are supporting fast growing businesses and creating real jobs and opportunities. Others, however, are trading and speculating between themselves, adding no social value, whilst generating huge profits and bonus pools.

Whilst the bankers and financiers have enjoyed huge personal rewards in recent years, our communities are now paying the price in lost jobs, shattered savings and service cuts.

There is now no justification for huge bonuses for individuals, built up on the back of government funded liquidity intended to protect out financial system from meltdown. Especially when its many of the same organisations and individuals whose high-risk behaviours have been responsible for getting us into this mess.

Dealing with this is very difficult. Knee jerking into punitive taxes and caps on personal or corporate earnings - popular though that may be - risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater. What we need is an intelligent approach which drives long term, structural change in the financial service industry, its behaviours and its contribution to our economic health.

I am hopeful that the baleful influence of the City on Labour thinking has finally been broken. The governments comments in the last few days on the importance of building up manufacturing & industry is welcome and long overdue.

A litmus test for me will be how Alistair Darling brings a Labour solution to this over the next few days.

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A Real Labour Budget

After listening to all the detail of the speech itself, it took a while for the real significance of Alistair Darling's budget to sink in. This is a real Labour budget, that at last puts some very red-tinged water between us and the Tories.

A Labour budget which shows we are determined to invest our way out of recession, not deepen it with cuts.

We are putting government money into the green economy, to stimulate investment in renewables, in re-cycling and the emerging high-technology industries that will create thousands of jobs. Many of these will be in the Highlands which already has a large number of such early stage businesses.

We are making sure our young people have training so that they can move into jobs when the economy picks up again. We are making sure that pensioners on lower incomes are protected from the worst effects of the recession. Small businesses, which make of the bulk of the economy, are getting real help to manage their cash flow, which in turn protects jobs.

The Tory answer to the recession - dramatic cuts in government spending - is exactly the policy which deepened and lengthened the great recession of the 1930s.

Sometimes you can tell you have got something right by the noise and clamour of your opposition. David Cameron's bluster today in response to Darling's speech, and the howls of anguish from right wing media about the 50% tax band tell me everything I need to know about whose side we are on. The ordinary people.

On the 10 o'clock news tonight, there was a piece about unemployment in a small town in South Wales. As always, its not the financiers and noisy professional classes who lose out most in this kind of recession. Its the same working people who have always lost out. That's the people whose side we are on. That's the people this budget is really for.

A real Labour budget. At last.

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