ON SUNDAY London Mayor Boris Johnson criticised the Labour Government for its ‘vindictive stance’ against The City’s under-fire moneymen. While his speech at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham was wamly welcomed by the party faithful, his timing was less than perfect. Today the same ‘vindictive’ administration announced the rescue of the Bradford and Bingley bank – the latest in a wave of nationalisations and takeovers in the beleaguered finance sector.
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“There is justifiable fury at some of the bankers who flogged these mortgages but it worries me when I hear a Labour government – a Labour government that inflated the bubble, that stoked the debt, that schmoozed the financiers, that shamelessly slaughtered sacred socialist cows on the smoky temple of Mammon – suddenly deciding that it would be popular to punish the capitalists and to bring in new regulations to fetter the banks” Johnson told the conference.
“I don’t believe that the best way of protecting the hard-working mortgage holders of London is to launch a vindictive attack on one of the most successful industries in this country.”
That many of those ‘hard-working mortgage holders’ took out loans from institutions originally fully funded as mutually assured building society’s was not mentioned by the Mayor. It was the Conservative government of the 1980s that drove through the de-mutualisation Acts which paved the way for these once solid institutions to be money-market financed, sub-prime heavy, mortgage banks.
Defending the laissez-faire attitudes of the previous Tory administration Johnson added: “I say to the Labour government – you will not make this country or its capital more competitive by driving away talent. You cannot regulate your way out of a recession. You can certainly regulate your way into one,” he said.
“No matter how much you may dislike the Masters of the Universe, my friends, there are plenty of other parts of the universe that would welcome them.”
Johnson’s battle-cry for bankers is in stark contrast to the attitudes of both Republican and Democrat politicians across the pond. There, the latest USD700billion bailout for the banks has been agreed on the basis that crunch-implicated financiers do not get to feed at the trough of fresh public money.
Mayor Boris meanwhile seems intent on retaining the present light-touch UK regulatory system overseen by the Financial Services Authority, a body that has borne the brunt of much criticism for its slow response to the unfolding current crisis.
Maybe Boris Johnson is enjoying the limelight a little too much. Whispers from inside the Tory camp say his party leader, David Cameron, is determined not to let the London loose cannon steal his thunder at conference. Johnson had originally been slated to speak at a triumphalist style meeting to celebrate a ‘year of Conservative victories’, but this was changed late-on by Cameron’s team. Officially this was in response to the continued credit emergency, the latest stage of which saw the takeover of B&B today, but the gossipers suggest alpha egos are now fully in play. With Labour mounting a recovery in recent polls, could this herald a new dawn of Conservative in-fighting?
It will come as a relief to Johnson then that a new portrait of him is going on show at the Annual Exhibition of Royal Institute of Oil Painters at the Mall Galleries, London. Painted by Dennis Syrett, the work shows Boris as – you guessed it – a ‘Master of the Universe – London Branch’.
