Verbal

Because the banks are too big to fail. Ask yourself a simple question. Where do all these HUGE bank bonuses come from? They don't come from thin air. They have to come from SOMEWHERE. Before the crash, it was gimmicky financial instruments like derivatives (among many others, of course), which held up mansions built on sand just long enough to make a vast killing. After the crash, so much of the merchant and investment banking industry went to the wall or was consolidated that it wiped out competition. The costs of banking services shot up; they gambled only on economic sure things; investment levels tumbled; and bank profits rocketed accordingly. Unfortunately for the rest of us, as public sector jobs get shredded by spending cuts, so too do private sector jobs by the banks' new (and hugely profitable) financial conservatism. So the bankers win yet again, because they are the most feather-bedded state scroungers of all - knowing full well that they can either risk all and be bailed out or risk nothing and profit from turning the economic tide sharply downward. What's desperately needed now is more competition in the banking sector - but what government can possibly advocate that after all that's happened? The bankers can't lose; we can't win.

Not in the real world. Let's look at who we're calling stupid. The banks in the US designed sub-prime loans, and ridiculous short-term discounts, in order to move as much 'product' as possible. Now they knew perfectly well that they were lending to people who in no way could afford those loans, and that the loans themselves were fuelling a property bubble. In the inevitable defaults, The only safety net for the bankers and their loans was precisely that bubble. If someone couldn't pay, turf them out, make a fast buck on the price rise, and get some other poor schmuck in to pick up an even bigger sub-prime. But the bankers weren't stupid. They KNEW these loans were dangerous. So they shattered each loan into tiny pieces and re-parceled it up with the tiny pieces of other loans - good loans mixed with bad. They called these packages 'derivatives', traded them, and suddenly found they had a new market. Trading in derivatives shot up. So now you have a double bubble, in which the bankers are getting exceedingly, obscenely rich - profiting hugely from the poorest in American society. Then you have the first set of victims - people near the breadline, on practically minimum wage, being sold the dream by these bankers and their brokers of infinite property price rises - and the nightmare of failing to be on board this life line to property ownership. I defy you or anyone to say that that nightmare hasn't had a powerful influence on their thoughts about buying a house. But for many people in the western US in particular, it drove them to make the simplest of calculations: can I make the mortgage payments this month. Sub-prime allowed them to say yes. The second set of victims of course are all of us. The bankers have made their vast profits and retired to their mortgage-free mansions. We are the ones picking up the bill for one of the greatest banking scandals - if not THE greatest - ever. So when you call people stupid from the crow's nest of the banking industry, it sounds amazingly like: I'm alright Jack and thanks for the cheque - now **** off.

Your hypocrisy is staggering. Unlike VFTT, you are NOT ashamed of what you've done - acting as a bedroom recruiting sergeant (no way would you ever make general) for gangs that entertain themselves with their violent awaydays, not outside football grounds, but against Asian men, men and children. I can't imagine that VFTT or anyone else would be remotely interested in your pathetic offer of a 'truce'. It really isn't about you, you , you.

I assume you've done this deliberately, to make it easy for anyone to see who VFTT really is. Nice.

That's what's known as a non-denial denial. You were EDL because you've said so in the past. Of course, that may mean you were EDL in the sense that you are a share-trading genius - that is to say, only in the fevered dreamworld you have to create to make your actual fetid existence tolerable.

Ah, Daniel Hannan, the Glenn Beck of the Tory Party, who describes the BNP as a 'far-left, anti-British party'. How lovely to see him again.

But you were.

So your pay packet was full of monopoly money, was it? Tell me more. And by what twisted 'logic' do you get to the idea that I am opposed to people making money? I've been a company director since 1995, and I'm happy to see people making money. The more the better. It's very difficult to engage with you and your odd little 'premises' because you are evidently such a sloganising slave to what you presumably see as a Tory party line. But even the few half-decent Tories I know can take on board that there are real problems ahead. And by the way, why is it that you and all the other Tory Party doorsteppers on here who can't spell the name of your own chancellor? I'll try spelling this out again, as succinctly as possible, and in the vain hope that you will grasp some of it. It is not that there is a particularly persuasive argument against spending cuts to deal with the structural deficit. Nor is it the case that anyone who disagrees with the reckless way in which Osborne is going about it is a Labour Party apparatchik. The argument about the where and when of cuts is much more subtle than that, and the consequences for getting it wrong much more severe. Is THIS a basis for discussion, or are you going to settle for Trumpton again?

So according to the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies, the outcome of Osborne's months in office so far is that families are on average £750 a year worse off. Perhaps some of the budget budgies on here, with their 'premises' and brilliant theories about how the country is like a small business, would like to offer a plausible defence of such daylight robbery.

In your case, presumably be careful not to smudge the print on the notes.

Wrong in so many ways. For a start, name a business that prints its own money. Apart from Sergei Ltd, obviously.

If by 'premise' you mean that fluffy nonsense you posted earlier, no one can engage with it by definition. Look, I'll be charitable. I'll assume you're young and either unemployed or in your first job. Naturally, in your private-sector idyll, you think the world is a entrepreneurial wonderland. One day, maybe not too far into the distance, you'll wake up and realise that the real world really isn't like that. A cleaner working for the council is laid off one day, as an unproductive lazy, expendable nothing, and then is rehired the next, and (with her wages cut to legal minimum or below) he or she, doing the exact same job, is suddenly 'productive'?! Meanwhile, in the world you refuse to engage in, companies like WPP are pulling Osborne like a puppet on a string. THAT"S the premise that should be engaged with, and which you can't even bear to address because it disturbs your serene, rose-tinted, 150-years-out-of-date view of a world divided into thrusting entrepreneurs with their sleeves-rolled-up workforces bursting at the seams with get-up-and-go-ness, and the deadweight doctors, nurses, fire crew, etc etc. As for 'waste', another indication that you've never worked in a real company for any length of time is that you appear to think this doesn't happen in the private sector. Trust me, it happens ALL the time. Empires are built, politics are played, non-jobs are created...Hiring and firing is the name of the game, private sector or public sector.

You're mistaking modern capitalism for Trumpton. WPP are a multinational who, like a lot of multinationals, lay down the law with governments. As the link showed quite clearly, WPP made an explicit set of threats and demands, got Osborne to do their bidding (and actually say so!), and gave him the final sop of saying: okay, maybe we'll come back and pay a fraction of the tax we should and plonk our HQ back in London. Multinationals like WPP create and wipe out jobs at a whim. The economy is dominated by them. Democracy, for hem, can go hang: they'll get their way come what may. But if you want to persist with a breathtakingly kindergarten model of the economy that rests the simplistic distinction between nasty public sector employees doing absolutely nothing all day long, and firebrand, can't get enough of making this country grrreeeaaattt private sector workers, then be my guest. But one word of warning: if you ever have a fire, don't go calling for Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert or Dibble. They've all been sacked.

Police corruption strikes again.

Not really Benj. WPP are famous for stunts like this. Here are some books they cooked earlier. http://www.bnet.com/blog/advertising-business/ad-agency-wpp-now-so-powerful-that-britain-will-change-its-tax-code-to-please-ceo-sorrell/5111

Only if you consider it a major coup to attract companies back to Britain who always, even when they were HQ'd here, kept a substantial proportion of their profits (and hence tax liabilities) offshore.

And this in the Daily Mail, whose politics I need hardly describe. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1369340/BUDGET-2011-Shocks-bonnet-middle-earners--youll-work-longer-pension.html

And it's a con anyway. The old Thatcher technique is at work here - changing the rules to eventually create a tax rise from a tax cut. Mary Ann Sieghart (an old tory herself) in the Independent yesterday: Meanwhile, a stealth tax will hurt us all more and more as the years go by. This is the use of the lower CPI inflation rate for increasing tax thresholds. By the end of this parliament, it will nearly wipe out all the gains from raising personal tax allowance by more than inflation. And in future parliaments, it will continue to scoop more money out of our pay packets and into Treasury coffers. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/mary-ann-sieghart/mary-ann-sieghart-no-wonder-clegg-looked-miserable-there-was-little-for-the-lib-dems-to-cheer-2251291.html

Rocknroll said 'slightly' not 'significant'. Of course, the amount of gain depends on your circumstances - so 'slightly' clearly applies to him. The 'giveaway' itself is a bit of a con, of course, given what the 'squeezed middle' has lost in the last two budgets and between. It's a pale version of what happened under Thatch, when the tax burden was piled on under the banner of tax cuts.

Probably when a cut of 50p on a full tank was thought to be adequate compensation for the £10-per-fill-up rise since tory boy slithered in.

I noticed that too. I wasn't the biggest fan of EM's at the start, but he's growing into it quite nicely, and he's worked out that Cameron is all surface oil and little else.

Weird that an old tory like yourself should endorse such crude social engineering in education - attempting to use universities to 'fix' pre-existing inequalities in a way that damages universities and their international standing. And you are clearly very healthy or a BUPA refusenik, because you can't have encountered any doctors recently, the most senior of whom have complained about the wrecking ball being taken to the NHS by the coalition by that bumbling idiot Andrew Lansley.

Thanks. I can get on with my work now.

Just waiting for the closet god botherers on here to flap by and claim there are no morals without religion.

Most people talk of yelling at their TVs. Apparently your TV yells at you. Odd. I can see the need for body armour, by the way. You swivelly-eyes are so thin-skinned.