By Ben Cohen
Reassuring news that New Labour is committed to real change in the UK:
Alistair Darling stepped back today from a radical overhaul of Britain's banks when he ruled out caps on bankers' pay or breaking up the biggest City institutions.
Pointing to the importance of 1m jobs in financial services and the £250bn of tax generated by the sector in the past nine years, the chancellor's much-anticipated response to the current "severe financial crisis" rejected demands for major reforms by opposition parties and the Bank of England governor Mervyn King.
So, Banks invest heavily in the subprime mortgage market, reap profit based on meaningless projections year after year, lose it all when the scheme collapses, take billions of pounds from the government, and then continue to pay their workers outrageous salaries. Sounds like a great deal to me. When will the Labour party stop pretending to represent actual labour? A more apt name would be 'The Corporate Party', or 'The Capital Party'. At least we'd know who they were actually representing.
