Exactly. Blair. Alistair Darling now on a major US bank.
The UK establishment have perfected the art of making the immoral legal. They are patient and wait for their reward.
Let's have another enquiry into it all! A "thorough" one that takes 5 years and costs millions only to find "systemic" issues with no individuals to blame.
There's nothing new about this, and nothing unique to the UK. Rich and powerful people tend to use their wealth and power to protect their wealth and power. And London has a lot of people with a lot of wealth and power.
The banking system is where most of the world's wealth resides, and since the London banking system dominates most of the global financial system, a lot of dodgy dealings happen in London. If you move it to the jungles of deepest darkest Peru, then the deepest darkest jungles of Peru will become corrupt.
I'm as disappointed as anyone about the cesspool of immorality that is modern finance, but David Cameron passing a few laws or conducting some kind of investigation is not going to change human nature. These are essentially the same problems that the Ancient Romans and Greeks complained about.
I dislike this kind of argument. Sometimes you see it trotted out regarding crime, and that it's impossible to e.g. stop people killing or burgling or thieving in general.
Except - we're doing a pretty good job of reducing such crimes.
It's easy to write off pretty much well any undesirable action as being "human nature" and I implore you to reconsider.
> David Cameron passing a few laws or conducting some kind of investigation is not going to change human nature
I agree that change is possible, but it's not going to come from the top. We the people need to push for that kind of change, but half the population is too busy repeating the establishment's line that "it's all the fault of immigrants".
I agree that it's nothing new in a general sense, but the reason this is catching people's attention is because there is this lingering perception that there is less corruption in the UK (and in western Europe, in general) than in other places.
The corruption is of a different nature. It's difficult to compare the corruption of, say, Kim Jong Un with that of David Cameron. In North Korea, the corruption is explicit and the proceeds benefit a small group of people. In the UK, it's systemic and hard to identify who's actually doing the corruption, and who benefits, and how.
It's even harder to identify how to fix it. In North Korea, we could just say "wipe out the leaders and it will fix the problem". In the rich world, the cronies don't belong to any one family, country, or business. It's an international aristocracy consisting of 1000s of people.
The UK establishment have perfected the art of making the immoral legal. They are patient and wait for their reward.
Let's have another enquiry into it all! A "thorough" one that takes 5 years and costs millions only to find "systemic" issues with no individuals to blame.
The UK's USP is "no time for financial crime".