first: this toothless piece of tat has cost the hard-pressed taxpayer £16 million and yet has failed to finger a single wrongdoer.

second: the most strident critic of the report, and its subjects is lord mandelson, a guiding light in moral probity and my very favourite arbiter of truth and goodness. and the best he can do is tell them he thinks they should apologise.

third: this third-rate bunch of spivs, under the gaze, nay with the assistance of the government achieved a feat usually reserved for the more-gifted though similarly morally-bankrupt operators known as asset strippers.

to strip assets on this scale from a company long-recognised by it’s german owners to be a vast liability is a feat which almost by definition suggests impropriety. (how much is a car company which you can buy for £10 and get a vast interest free loan to run it worth? come on; the clue’s in the question.)

so how do these maggots justify taking over £40 million out of it while it’s dying on it’s arse?

hilariously, throughout the day, national news channels have referred to mg rover as the uk’s last remaining volume car manufacturer, whilst assorted industry pundits have sought to justify this plundering by suggesting that these “rewards” were consistent with the industry norms.

in reality, by contrast with the world’s genuine volume car makers, decades of woeful mismanagement had left the group looking like something under a railway arch. depressing to say the least.

how fortunate then that we now have such genius at our disposal in the financial services sector that we need no longer concern ourselves with such grubby enterprises as making things that others want to buy.

“where you been boy? oh, down the job centre?” ‘yeah. all centre, no job! but they’ve got new chairs; and a yucca plant. oh, and uniforms. musta cost a fortune!’

“come across john towers or any of his lousy cronies down there? no, thought not.”

in the teeth of bitter opposition from the rump of labour mps who still remember what socialism means our hero has assured us for months that the sell-off was a dead-cert.

well swipe me. out of the blue, the slippery little spinner now advises us that the essential sale is now off as he has found it impossible to negotiate a satisfactory price.

so, nothing to do with trying to appease the parliamentary labour party and keep the great leader in number 10 a bit longer then.

well obviously not!

bye for now pundits.

amazingly sir vanquished blank,
who many think should walk the plank
remains as captain of the bank,
although whilst in his charge it sank.

what fortune, he can be on hand
to see it safely back to land.
another twelve months seems like ages,
but no doubt he’ll enjoy the wages.

swipe me, how shocking!

but where to start? the field of potential targets is so broad and slow-moving it’s tempting to just pick-off the easiest first, so i will

okay then, let’s bag the bankers. back in the day a bank manager was as boring as a wet weekend in wigan. in fact boring was part of his job specification. (these days, what passes for a bank manager is almost certainly a sad, 25 watt, wet-behind-the-ears kid in an equally sad 100 watt suit, but these creatures are so far down the food chain that we’ve done ourselves a disservice even to have mentioned them).

no, the boys were interested in here are the savile row suited chief executives of banks, along with their fellow board members: those with reponsibility for setting strategy including lending policy and just as importantly the funding arrangements which will facilitate and support those lendings.

in simple terms, instead of referring to the tried-and-tested system which related bank lendings to their balance sheets and which had saved banks from their own stupidity for centuries, these flash idiots (1) lent money the didn’t have in vast quantities to people who (2) could not repay it. whoops, it’s all over!

of course between (1) and (2) there’s a period when everything looks just ginger-peachy which is when these grasping creatures bag their bonuses.

hang ‘em up with piano wire. next?

ah yes, the fsa. a sloppy toothless dog of an outfit armed and ready with brown’s patent light-touch system of regulation.

a complete waste of time and space. shut it down and let them get proper jobs. next?

step-up the bank of england: what do they do for a living? neither do i! put ‘em out to grass. next?

and finally, the government, who must without doubt shoulder the lions share of the blame for this ruinous debacle. don’t listen to what brown tells you about this mess. never mind it’s a global recession and an international banking crisis, though of course it is.

take my word for it, at the heart of the uk’s woes are years of slack banking policy characterized by an unwillingness to increase interest rates, which year-on-year fuelled consumer borrowing to deranged levels. and all for fear of scaring the horses, which was exactly what the horses needed for their own good.

in short, our banks have been permitted, some might therefore say tacitly encouraged to get away with lousy, casino-style lending/funding policies which would have had the proper bank manager i mentioned earlier rotating in his grave.

and what do you expect if you allow pigs unhindered access to the trough?

don’t forget that these years of unsustainable spiral accelerating to inevitable implosion were accompanied, day-in, day-out by brown’s smug “no return to boom and bust” mantra. so pathetic.

the fact that he knows all of the above and yet has the brass-neck to remain in his job says so much about brown i think i’ll just bugger-off and leave it at that. next?

let me see. oh dear, i appear to have run out of low-hanging fruit. still all good things etc; and they were yummy.

caio for now basket cases

on the February 14, 2009 i mentioned that the lloyds-tsb takeover of the disgraced yet extraordinarily still in denial hbos

“entailed a sickening injection of taxpayers funds to push the deal through. those same taxpayers, not to mention lloyds-tsb shareholders have now found that aside of acquiring the most ludicrous, scrabbletastic collection of acronyms in corporate history, lloyds banking group has swallowed a poison pill of epic toxicity.”

i further recommended that you “don’t rule out it’s complete, not to say ignominious nationalisation in short order.”

well, as predicted, the other shoe, i mean the bill has landed. stand by your beds for a further taxpayer-backed asset (liability, surely) insurance arrangement to the tune of some £250 billion (count ‘em). in return the hapless citizen (scuse i, shareholder) will receive an increased stake in the banking basket case.

my advice: stop trying to mask the scale of the horror by piecemeal bailout of this lame dog, at ever increasing cost to the taxpayer. nationalise it now!

poor itv, it’s on the rack.
the wall is firmly to it’s back.
for so long it was in the black
but these days it ain’t making jack.

curtailing winners, like the bill
just leaves it with more hours to fill.
soon viewers could be close to nil,
just one-or-two old dears in rhyl.

thought that was bad? it’s getting worse.
i’m gonna do another verse.

no sign of any blue sky thinking
with balance sheet and punters shrinking.
just to exacerbate the trough
the advertisers buggered-off.

quite simply for the last decade
it’s programmes haven’t made the grade.

see what i did there? grade .. ha-ha.

ceegar son?

it seems that lord myners, the man safeguarding (i use the word loosely) the interests of the hard-pressed taxpayer, was just days into his appointment when he signed-off the offending package, so in fairness we should make allowances for his rookie status.

but just a minute: this is a man with a city career so sparkling you can probably see it from jupiter. his cv reads like a who’s who of british business.

having been forced to endure numerous top flight directorships including, notably at pension fund manager gartmore, where he was chief executive from 1985, rising to chairman in 1987 until 2001, we could probably expect him to have at least a working knowledge of the mysteries of the boardroom in general and of pension packages in particular.

sadly however it would appear that he failed to enquire whether goodwin’s proposed pension was to any extent discretionary, or was the subject of a binding contract, which it was not, and just rolled-over.

telling us now that he did not know about the discretionary element is simply not good enough. he’s paid to know. this leaves him, the government and the pissed-off taxpayer in an invidious position.

okay, i’m getting bored with this, not unreasonably, so for brevity:

myners > pathetic; money for old rope >> get lost.

brown > even more embarrassingly cack-handed than ever >> push-off now.

goodwin > thick-skin? bloody elephant hide surely? >> give the dough back or break out the flack-jacket and tin hat.

see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.

let’s be honest, the idea that in any circumstances any individual should be paid a pension of £650,000 a year, from the age of 50, is breathtaking. in the present economic climate and given this man’s abject record, this is a sickening abuse.

the government, which at the taxpayers’ expense has had to drag this basket-case from the brink of bancruptcy should simply tell him he aint gettin’ it, and, if necessary, see him in court.