Another non-admission from Labour that they got it wrong in government

In the week that yet more good news on the economy (inflation, house sales and retail sales) hit the headlines, Labour Leader Ed Moribund has announced that yet again, Labour screwed up when they were running the country. Okay, they didn’t say they screwed up, but Miliband’s attacks on the market dominance of the big five banks has to be taken as an admission that they messed up under Blair and especially Brown. After all, the move to create the Lloyds Banking Group by merging Lloyds TSB and HBOS came straight from the bowels of 10 Downing Street when Miliband was in the cabinet. Now that he has discovered that competition was reduced by this merger, he may wish to dwell on the fact that Labour had to suspend competition law to force through their disastrous Lloyds/HBOS merger. In other words, they knowingly reduced competition in the vain hope that nationalisation of the banks could be avoided. Now, Miliband is pointing the finger of blame at a decision in which he has a share of the blame.

The question now is, where have Labour been for the past 4 years? Most of their solutions have been lifted from the pages of Coalition documents. For example, they call for the creation of two new banks from RBS and Lloyds, though this is already happening. They demand that the likes of Lloyds be forced to sell branches. This is happening. Perhaps Rip Van Winkle has been writing Miliband’s speeches.

It is interesting to watch the “socialist” comrades on my patch in the North East be incredulous with rage when they are accused of allowing the Big Six energy companies to be formed when they were in office. It will be interesting to see how they respond when they are reminded that they allowed, indeed promoted, the creation of gigantic banking corporations.

Labour will now do what they can to detract attention away from the economic recovery they predicted would never happen. So watch out for more Miliband speeches in which he attacks the legacy of the government of which he was a part without accepting any responsibility for the decisions that created that legacy.