Financial Crisis Has Odd Effects in UK
Among them are a revived Gordon Brown and a blow to Scottish nationalists.
In a bizarre twist of political fate Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown has actually gone up in the polls of late after his fate was unsettled in the lead-up to his annual party conference last month. Despite the fact he had a hand in the country’s financial situation, as Chancellor of the Exchequer for 10 years, the public seems to think that he is the best man for the job.
It surely helps that his plan has been adopted by the rest of Europe as they slowly realized that their “European model” of banking did not make them immune from banking problems. In fact at one point one European bank per day was announced to be in financial trouble. In an unprecedented move Gordon Brown was invited by Sarkozy to an emergency meeting of the Eurozone countries, even though the UK is not part of it. The whole debacle may in fact end the Euro in its current form, at least with its current number of members, and pretty much assures the UK will never be a member.
As with the U.S., most people on High Street (U.K.’s Main Street) had no sympathy whatsoever for the bankers who were losing their jobs in the city of London by the thousands. The bite is starting to show as the UK government has finally had to admit that the level of unemployment in the UK is going up quickly:
Official figures show that the jobless total leapt by 164,000 between June and the end of August. The higher-than-expected increase — of 0.5 percentage points to 5.7 percent — is the biggest since 1991 and the eighth successive monthly rise.
Not only that, but the Treasury has finally had to admit that growth has slowed significantly and that inflation is higher than previously admitted. These two effects are rather obvious to most people on the street here.
In the light of the unprecedented semi-nationalization of eight leading British banks by the British government that was announced last week, there are repercussions not quite imagined.
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Andrew Ian Dodge blogs at Dodgeblogium.
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11 Comments
1. Anonymous:Interesting. I hadn’t heard that unemployment there was so low (I’m a Yank). Up .5% to 5.7%? Pretty good for anywhere, especially for Europe. I bet Brits are used to better and are crying their eyes out, instead of counting their blessings.
Btw, secession is always a bad idea. Always some wanker gets some romantic, nationalistic notions. Always just a power-grab, or worse, self-deluding idealism. You Brits may have your differences with each other, but to the rest of the world, you’re siblings. No one attacks one of you without attacking the other. Never lose sight of that.
Besides, if the Skotti tried to secede, wouldn’t the Queen ratse an Army and march on the rebels, hmm?
Oct 22, 2008 - 2:44 am 2. Andrew Ian Dodge:Watching the Nats decrying Gordon Brown, calling for Scottish Independence with their hand out to London is most amusing. The verbal machinations of Alex Salmond’s speech to his party conference last weekend were amusing to say the least.
Oct 22, 2008 - 4:02 am 3. Dodgeblogium » Financial Crisis Has Odd Effects in UK:[...] more @ PJM. [...]
Oct 22, 2008 - 4:03 am 4. JoshC:“Interesting. I hadn’t heard that unemployment there was so low (I’m a Yank). Up .5% to 5.7%? Pretty good for anywhere, especially for Europe. I bet Brits are used to better and are crying their eyes out, instead of counting their blessings.”
Many of my fellow Brits like to have a good moan about anything and everything, whether we have anything to moan about or not. We’ve had 10 or so uninterrupted years of the best economic circumstances in living memory but people will still claim that the current Government is one of the worst of all time. The crisis we (and the rest of the world) are going through now doesn’t begin to compare to the misery of the 1980’s but many still wish we were back in the ‘good old days’ where we had a million more people unemployed and our services were either left to rot by the then Government or sold off cheap so they’d have some money to spend in election year tax cuts.
I’ve come to the conclusion that many of my fellow countrymen are idiots with the memories of goldfish.
Oct 22, 2008 - 10:33 am 5. Marc Malone:JoshC – We have the sasme problem here. Obama is fond of saying how we have the worst economy since the great depression, completely forgetting the late-70’s under Carter, also ignoring that things just aren’t all that bad. It’s mostly fear.
Oh, that first post was me. Somehow, the site forgot to remember me. Odd.
Oct 22, 2008 - 2:47 pm 6. Andrew Ian Dodge:Brown has finally admitted that the country is in fact in recession. Not that he really had to tell anyone that but still.
Oct 23, 2008 - 5:01 am 7. David H:JoshC is obviously living on another planet and you have the memory of a goldfish, or the intellect of one.
Yes Britain had been booming but the conditions for this was laid by that much despised government of John Major, this was in spite of Labour, your lot of idiots inherited a pretty damn good situation, however your lot then went on a spending spree and also failed to keep on top of the city’s worst excesses, the FSA has failed to do its job.
Funny enough Gordon Brown has managed to carry out one of Michael Foots objectives, nationalise the UK banks.
Shall we talk about the 70’s then and one of your chappies running off cap in hand begging to the IMF, and dead bodies unburied for weeks due to strikes. The hard medicine of the 1980’s was so much harder because your lot had failed to do anything right in the 60’s and 70’s.
This current government is the worst of all time, because they wasted a huge amount of money during the good years and they have nothing left apart from creating a huge debt to deal with the recession. If I ran my business like Labour has run the UK, I would be bankrupt and living in a cardboard box.
In my opinion Britain should have been in a nice position to weather this storm based on competent government with inly a slight increase in debt, but your lot of incompetents have taken us right back to the 70’s.
Oct 23, 2008 - 6:39 am 8. Claire:Great site. Maybe I will link to this page.
Oct 31, 2008 - 7:48 am 9. koolbulb:Good Comment @Marc Malone.
The financial crisis is spreading to all the sectors and the ultimate results will be available by the end of 2009. Anyway the crisis is very crusial to all western markets since its a prestigeous counter movement from these governments and it should show some good results by the mid of next year atleast. But in terms of asian countries, it is a good opportunity to find alternative solutions and reconfirm their best practices followed over the past years. Some of the basic causes of financial crisis is, bad credit loans processed by the financial institutions to the customers and third parties. But in case of growing markets, most of the banks are assuring the creditworthiness of their clients twice since most of the clients are not high profile clients. Hence this didn’t make much impact on their financial systems and processed loan payment shedules.
Nov 1, 2008 - 11:55 pm 10. Kashif:for MORE DETAILS
it will effect UK the most because 73% of the GDP comes from services sector and financial sector dominates the service sector. Unemploment rate is already up, what next?
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Nov 26, 2008 - 12:13 pm