Outrage D'Jour: My Pension Fund Went To India And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

At least Brown only robbed a chunk of your pension. Now Gideon wants the rest.

Yes, indeed, it's the opportunity to invest into infrastructure projects - and you know it must be good because, by defnition, these are projects no one in the private sector will touch.

No, wait..... that can't be right.

Say, you don't think there's a potential for corruption when big companies are being invited to invest their pension funds into supporting vanity projects proposed by the self-same politicians who award large government contracts?

Liberals: Still Scum

I'm thinking this case is the perfect microcosm of the difference between left and right.

Yes, indeed, HSBC were their usual sleazy selves, and it's disgraceful that their senior management have managed to avoid disbarment for conduct that would have got a small town IFA strung up, but at least they've faced some consequences.

Meanwhile, the supposed charidees wot exist to help the helpless? Ah yes: they traded on their (undeservedly) good reputations to lead the marks into the lion's den, and they've got away with the cash, their reputations intact and in all probability a press release ready to go asking for the government to give them a grant to help protect their clients from predatory capitalist pig dogs.

Atrocity Story Goes Bad

The Telegraph is shocked - shocked! - to find out that bank underwriters are taking customer's outgoings into account when calculating how much they can borrow. This would never have happended when that nice Scottish guy was PM.

Unfortunately, even the Telegraph commentors aren't daft enough to fall for this. Read and enjoy the smell of jorno flambé.

Beeboid Baffled: Govt Refuses To Investigate Fantasy Screw-Ups

Liberals claim to be outraged! at the bank bailouts, but it always seems to be the ones that got away that really hack them off.

Take Beeboid Robert Preston and his attempts to explain how RBS's implosion means Barclays's management should be up for a public flogging.

Yep, you haven't missed something, his argument really is that stupid: if Barclays hadn't dropped out of the bidding for ABN, they might have paid too much for it, and that might have run down their cash reserves, if they hadn't been offering mainly shares instead of cash.

Nevertheless, in a stunning rebuttal to all that talk of 'liberal fascism', Preston still thinks a private business should be called to account for doing what it didn't actually do in the first place:

However the FSA has neither the time nor the powers to extract the relevant testimony from Barclays. So we won't get it.

But how about that Balen Report anyway? Any chance of extracting testimony about that? Especially since, unlike Barclays, the BBC really does take billions of pounds of public money.

Note too how the multiple layers of fact checking managed to leave out the bit about Barclays offering shares instead of cash in his first post - and note the typically classless way Preston acknowledges the libel, doubtless after a call from m'learned friends:

PS. Barclays (no surprise here) is keen for me to point out that the value of its offer for ABN was significantly lower than that made by the RBS consortium. And Barclays was mainly offering shares, rather than precious cash. So its board behaved less recklessly than RBS's.

But Barclays does not dispute that it should probably say a little prayer of thanks more-or-less every waking minute that it did not end up as the owner of ABN.

So, his report was perfectly accurate, except for the factual bits. It's the unique way they're funded, y'know....

The 'Bankers' Are Innocent

I've seen this all over the place, but you really can't remind people of this too often - guess the the odd man out here:

Lord Stevenson (ex-Halifax Bank of Scotland)
Andy Hornby (ex-HBOS)
Sir Fred Goodwin (ex-Royal Bank of Scotland)
Sir Terry Wogan, Radio 2 DJ
Sir Tom McKillop (ex-RBS)
Alistair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer

The answer is - of course - Terry Wogan: he's the only one with any qualifications in banking. Blame the bankers? Bankers would have been an improvement on this lot.

Bankers

How can you tell when welfarism has gone out of control ? When this happens.

Your Call Is Very Important To Us, Please Hold While We Arrange For A Sleazy Moron To Defame You

Liberals have long had the ‘ladder of victimhood’ to help them remember who to support when, say, Islamofascists announce that if Allah meant women to be taken seriously, he’d have given them brains, or when rap artists produce jovial ditties about murdering gays. Equally, important, but less well known, is the Liberal enemies list, used to ensure that the baddie in any given situation is always the one Liberals hate most.

This is why British soldiers are a murderous gang of savages, sort of like the SS but without the discipline and the spiffy uniforms, except when they get killed by the USAF, in which case they’re Anne Frank.

Or take a recent example from the BBC. Normally, the mere mention of big financial institutions has Liberals channelling Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Ditto, outsourcing. Factor in that Libs also think that Big Business provides lousy service just because they can and what do you have ? The BBC allowing an insurance company to claim, without evidence or additional commentary, that all those complaints about its lousy service are the result of a racist conspiracy. Ah yes.

But is there something a bit more unsavoury playing a part in customer dissatisfaction?

"Some people definitely had a certain mindset and decided the call was going to be bad before they'd even dialled the number," says Adrian Web from Esure...

"When we listened back to calls people had complained about often they were fine. Some people wanted the member of staff to fail because they were in India."...

People's complaints might have initially been fuelled by a bit of xenophobia, but it is now about the service they are receiving, says Ms Hathway.

That's balance at the BBC. One guy calling the Great British Public racists, one lass saying that they're racist but there also have other motivations. Call it a wild guess, but I’m thinking if some guy claimed it was all down to the fact them darkies can’t work a phone, the BBC might have managed a follow-up question or two. On the plus side, we now know one company to avoid when it’s renewal time.

UPDATE:

Just to clairfy, I think the whiner from esure might be right about some customers, it's just that the BBC has spent years covering how eviiil Big Business exploits defenceless consumers, so it's hard to see this sudden outbreak of sympathy for our poor, abused financial services industry as anything other than Class IV humbuggery.