A Spending Cut Proposal

Obviously it is the done thing in modern British politics - after years of unrealistic and unconvincing denials - to talk about spending cuts and to start ear-marking potential areas of government influence for the chop. Now, I'd like to propose a cut in spending that I genuinely think everyone can get behind. Yes, I think we should stop spending money on failing banks.

For Marxists, this sort of behaviour is simply propping up the "terrible" capitalist regime. For socialists and social democrats, this is rewarding failed rich people and taking resources away from those more "deserving" of government cash. For conservatives, bailing out failing businesses means people are absolved of responsibility for their failings by the government. And for free market capitalists, this represents yet another unwarranted and unwanted government intervention in the economy.

And for the man on the street, who has been indoctrinated with the idea that bankers are bad through a programme of government indoctrination and propaganda that truly would make Stalin proud, this is again a good thing because those bankers are pretty much evil.

I know we have already invested a lot in some of these banks, and that if we don't continue to prop them up then that investment is pretty much gone. Yet partial government ownership doesn't seem to be helping the likes of Lloyds pull themselves up out of the shit, and I can't help but think that all we are doing is increasing the amount we are inevitably going to lose when the government finds it can no longer bail these banks out.

There is such a thing of throwing good money after bad; and it increasingly looks as if funding Lloyds et al is doing precisely that.