Banking: When you sup with the State, no spoon is long enough.

So we see the Treasury parading "their plan" for the break-up of State-supported banks to "increase competition on the High Street".

Andrew Neil has neatly pulled back the Treasury's velvet curtain to expose the pretence and falsehoods of the announcement. I shall not repeat what he says.

Did Darling-Brown know that the EU would force this, in which case they were at best disingenuous and even fraudulent when putting the case to Lloyds, or were they just* incompetent?

Either way it shows that The Treasury is NOT Sovereign in the UK anymore. It is set to degrade from being an independent Sovereign entity to a regional head office, to a mere branch and then, finally, the indignity of being an ATM.

Lloyds would not have failed. Barclays did not. HSBC did not. Had RBS been slapped hard enough on the back to spit out Nat West, the latter would have survived without State aid.

All four English "High Street Banks" not requiring State Aid to see them through the crisis? That does not fit into the plan. That would not give the Devil, I mean, the State a chance to get its control-freak fingernails into the Banks' operations, to "manage the market".

What it will do is send a message to all financial institutions as to "who is boss". It might make some kow-tow to The State in the short term, but only for as long as they can restructure and move their wealth and operations elsewhere behind the scenes. London as a major financial hub is threatened yet again by the combination of our current abominable Labour administration and their puppet-masters in Brussels. To think it is not part of a plan then again puts us onto the alternative, that of their utter incompetence.

Either way we need rid of the puppet-master and the election of a new Administration free of puppets. Common sense will tell you to get both we need the latter before we can achieve the former.


* I say "just" as I think this term applies across both cases.