When Mrs Thatcher
became Conservative Prime Minister in 1979, one of her first acts was to
abolish "Exchange Controls".
Using Government figures which were readily available, I found it simple
to calculate that £60 billion had left our shores within 6 months, monies which
would otherwise have been invested in British Industries. Thatcher went on to start the deregulation of
the banks, so with these two acts the seeds of financial ruin were sown.
Sadly when Labour
eventually took over, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, who later of
course became Prime Minister, had no real conception of financial matters, politics
got him there, not ability. He was known
to ignore sound advice given him, living in awe of the City of London .
A typical example of this occurred just months before the Credit Crunch
broke. He held a lavish party at 10 Downing Street . Invited were all the top bankers and
financiers in the city. By his side his
trusty advisor Sir Fred Goodwin whom Brown had earlier recommended for a
peerage!
As Hansard shows, Brown
lost no opportunity to heap praises on his friend, who with his unbridled
capitalism led the Royal Bank of Scotland into bankruptcy. It was Brown of course who had supervised the
final deregulation of the banks, which even the High Priestess of Capitalism
herself, Lady Margaret Thatcher, dared not do.
It did not take a lot of vision to see what was going to happen. The year before the Credit Crunch broke, I
spent two days working out the amount of debt in the country covering every
aspect of borrowing. I estimated this to
have reached £1 trillion, which I
described in an article as a "giant financial bubble, ready to
burst".
When the Credit Crunch broke, the Treasury
estimated the National debt at £1.4 trillion, but then we were
told it had just reached £1 trillion, so what are we to believe? One thing that is certain is that on current
borrowing the National debt continues to rise month by month, year by year, a
position which is unsustainable. The
extent of Britain 's
debt was shown by the disclosure that out of all the G20 countries this
country's debt was the largest per capita.
Why have we not by now been plunged into total chaos? The answer is that were it not for Scottish
Oil Revenues currently pouring into the London Treasury, we could now be in a similar
position to Greece .
Can you now see why
David Cameron has said "I will strain every sinew of my body to keep
Scotland within the UK."
See also: More blogs by John Jappy
See also: More blogs by John Jappy