The Chancellor, Alastair Darling, must be regretting accepting the poisoned chalice. At the moment he is facing two big issues, and can expect a grilling when he stands up in the Commons.
The problem of Northern Rock will not go away, and a firm decision must be made soon to end the uncertainty. The share price this morning has been like a yo-yo. None of the choices in front of him is pleasant, and he stands to lose "friends" whatever he decides - shareholder anger, depositor disfavour or large amounts of taxpayers' money.
On top of this the chief of Revenue and Customs has honorably resigned because his department has lost computer discs containing child benefit details on 15 million children. The possibilities for fraud and identity theft are enormous.
These things happened on Darling's watch, and although he has made the Northern Rock fiasco worse by his dithering, there is a large sense that decisions by Gordon Brown have been very instrumental. It was Bottler who merged the two huge departments of Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise, and immediately required from them huge savings in manpower. The merged department was a disaster waiting to happen. It was Bottler, also, who interfered with the banking supervision arrangements. Previously The Bank of England had supervised the banking system, at the behest of the Chancellor. Brown's revision created a three-way division, involving the Bank, the Treasury and the Financial Services Authority. If the designer himself understood the demarcations of responsibility, clearly the Bank and FSA did not, or found the situation difficult to operate.
Sop far the Chancellor has been singularly unimpressive, but the two cases with which he now struggles are partly the fault of the Prime Minister.
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1 comment:
You're right - Feel sorry for Darling- he's not been thee long, and he has problems made by Brown
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