If only Gordon Brown had legislated against your ineptitude, eh?
Bloody socialists.

Flowers has now had his collar felt so we should be careful what we say about him.

But it does seem strange that there are any number of investigations surrounding a bloke who allegedly tried to score £300 worth of drugs, yet Lord Green who presided over HSBC laundering £6bn of drug cartel money, not a bloody word.

Cameron's pathetic attempts to link Miliband to Flowers at Wednesday's PMQs has Lynton Crosby writ large all over it and could well come back to bite him on his 'arris

Absolutely.



Nobody much seems to bother about Goldman Sachs and the accounting of Greece's books either.

A drug taking pervert with a previous conviction for indecency, and a current penchant for rent boys, plus the small matter of £75K in false expenses from his previous position in Bradford.....it just had to be Bradford, eh, is appointed to the Chairmanship of a bank which claimed the moral high ground in the murky world of financial dealings.

Love it.

And we've still to hear the explanation for the millions offered to Red Ed's lot
at very soft rates, although that may take a little while as he's still pondering how to avoid an Inquirey into the Falkirk Labour Party Fiasco.....

You are aware of the history of the Co-operative Movement and the Labour party? The Co-op have been Labour benefactors almost since its inception. You really must try a little harder and remember that all the time you're slinging mud, you are invariably losing ground.

No he's just demonstrating the hypocrisy of the Labour leadership - who have done the same over Coulson, News International, party funders, etc. Cameron is just showing that all politicians are "in it together." Milliband has played the holier than thou card for a long time and now he has his own questions to answer and rightly so.

Is that a West Country homily Coddy? Yes I was aware of The Co-op's traditional relationship, just not aware it was so rlCosyrl

But you will be as disgusted as me at the history of the guy they appointed Chairman.......will you not?

There you go, you and the Wail seem to be conflating The Co-op Group, the Co-op Bank and Paul Flowers. Why on earth should Balls hand back a donation that was made by the Co-op Group, especially when the tories have yet to hand back the money they received from Azil Nadir?

But the other part of the scandal is Labour's alleged facilitation / encouragement of the mergr with Britannia, whicch brought the Co-op down. Same guys who hastily facilitated Lloyds "rescue" of HBoS to much self-congratulation. As I predicted on here as they were doing that all it would do would destroy an otherwise strong bank. It did and the taxpayer had to bail out Lloyds. There is a pattern here - uttter, utter incompetence by Labour when it comes to anything financial (seemingly, other than when it benefits certain members of their party).

If the Tories have an sense they will make this Co-Op story runand run, via enquiries, up until the election. That will serve to remind the voters of who was in power when the banking system and who failed to oversee the sectors regulation - as apparently demonstrated by this case. If they do that, I think they'll get a majority - especially with inevitable pre-election engineered improvement in the economy, feel-good factor, etc that each party always manages to engineer for a few months.

As was pointed out to you at the time, if any bank was allowed to fail, the economic consequences would've been far worse, notwithstanding the threat of civil unrest when a whole sector of the banking public could not access [itheir[/i money.

As for letting the Co-op saga run, I still believe there is the potential for even greater damage to the tory party, quite apart from what may be revealed in ongoing trials at the Old Bailey. As for the banking crisis of 2008, the conservatives have been busy attempting to airbrush from the internet various speeches made by leading tories in opposition pre-2010. Fortunately for the British public, the internet is not as easy to rewrite as a history text book.

This is going to be a very messy 18 months, at the end I'm still of the opinion that the tory 'dirty-tricks' strategy will bite them on the a[ir[/ise

No what should have happened is that Britannia's depositors should have been supported and wound up as expeditiously as possble. They should not have dragged a second institution down with it.

The only pattern here is your ridiculous take on the history of the banking crisis and its consequences.



You do realise the problems with the Co-op bank have been a running for several years? That is its continued weakness as a bank has not been set right by intervention under the previous Labour government and this government over the last three years?

Look at this from July 2012

rlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18898125rl

[iThe Chancellor, George Osborne, welcomed the deal.

"This is another step towards creating a new banking system for Britain that gives real choice to customers and supports the economy," he said.[/i

However from Robert Peston's blog

"In April of 2012, the Financial Services Authority - precursor of today's Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority - told Co-op Group that it did not have appropriate management skills and that Co-op Bank had too little capital to be allowed to fulfil its ambition of becoming much bigger by buying more than 600 branches from Lloyds."

"For what its worth, senior FSA people have told me that their reluctance to be more aggressive with Co-op Bank is because of their perception that the Treasury and MPs from both parties wanted Co-op to become much bigger and more powerful."

From herehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25032296rl

So in April in 2012 we have the FSA saying the co-op had too little capital to be allowed to fulfil its ambition of becoming much bigger by buying more than 600 branches from Lloyds.

Yet four months later Osborne is saying what a good idea it is they buy the branches!

And you accuse Labour of failing to regulate the banks?

Polly Peck. There's a blast from the past. Yes, i'd agree that the Tories should have handed Nadir his money back, but its never going to happen.

I've thought for a couple of years that the Co-Op was being a tad ambitious, and being of a cynical disposition didn't buy into their ethics mantra. There was however a little bit of me that did want them to reveal a decent set of figures, and raise a middle digit to the rest.

Yes - as I said on this thread to the "merger" with Britannia in early 2009.

But it does seem strange that there are any number of investigations surrounding a bloke who allegedly tried to score £300 worth of drugs, yet Lord Green who presided over HSBC laundering £6bn of drug cartel money, not a bloody word.

Cameron's pathetic attempts to link Miliband to Flowers at Wednesday's PMQs has Lynton Crosby writ large all over it and could well come back to bite him on his 'arris'