DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Red Ed's statist plan to wreck the banks

By DAILY MAIL COMMENT

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He began the week trying to outflank the Tories by claiming to be the unlikely saviour of Britain’s hard-pressed  middle classes.

By yesterday, however, Socialist Red Ed was back with a vengeance as the Labour leader promised a ‘reckoning’ with the nation’s banks.

Once again, Ed Miliband cannot be faulted for shrewdly identifying an issue of huge concern to the public.

Red sky in the morning: Ed Miliband has promised a 'reckoning' with the nation's banks

Red sky in the morning: Ed Miliband has promised a 'reckoning' with the nation's banks

The banks have treated their customers with contempt for years and there is a desperate need for greater competition.

Yet, as with Mr Miliband’s plans to seize land from house builders and freeze energy prices, his anachronistic statism displays sheer economic illiteracy.

By order of Whitehall, the banks would be made to give up ‘significant’ numbers of branches and accept a rigid cap on their market share.

As the Governor of the Bank of England warns, this would not result in ‘substantial improvement to competition’.

Rather, analysts predict it will lead to branch closures in deprived regions and the shutting of accounts belonging to less well-off customers which do not make the banks a profit.

Meanwhile, the uncertainty created by the prospect of a Labour assault on their assets can only make the sale of state-owned Lloyds and RBS back to the private sector far harder to achieve.

Indeed, it speaks volumes that Mr Miliband’s business-bashing speech wiped £500million off their shares yesterday.

In fairness to the Coalition, it has been making slow but steady progress in encouraging the creation of new challenger banks. The financial sector – which Labour allowed to become too big to fail, then bailed out with our money – is gradually being restored to health after the great crash of 2008.

Red Ed, with his starry-eyed belief that the State has the answer to everything, is the last man the country should trust to finish the job.

Stop playing games

   

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Yesterday business leaders warned of job losses if the Chancellor’s plan to raise the minimum wage by 11 per cent  is implemented.

In response George Osborne is expected to cut National Insurance to soften the blow to industry from a politically-motivated policy calculated to present the Tories as champions of the poor.

A reduction in NI – a tax on jobs – is of course welcome.

But is it too much to hope that, instead of obsessing over how to invade each other’s ‘territory’, the Tories and Labour might stop playing Westminster parlour games and concentrate on what is best for securing the economic recovery?

Clegg’s humiliation

What a grubby, unedifying mess the Lord Rennard debacle continues to be.

On Wednesday, an inquiry established by Nick Clegg found ‘credible’ evidence that lecherous behaviour by the Lib Deem peer had ‘caused distress to a number of women’.

But Alistair Webster QC said that because the case could not be proved beyond ‘reasonable doubt’ – the standard required by the party’s rulebook – the  ex-campaign chief could not be disciplined or expelled.

The only action an impotent, blustering Mr Clegg could demand was an apology – which Lord Rennard instantly refused.

Now, to complete Mr Clegg’s humiliation, we learn the peer is planning to return next week to the Lib Dem group in the House of Lords.

The question that troubles the Mail is: if Mr Clegg can’t run a simple party disciplinary inquiry, what horrors are we still to discover about his work as Deputy Prime Minister?

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