Battered by Iceland again
WE'RE at war with Iceland... again.
You'd have thought we would have had more sense than to invest billions with a country which has tried over the years to take the very food from our plates... to separate the cod from our chips.
I'm sure it was news to many that Iceland was considered a financial power house in the world of global economics.
My impression was of a sulphurously-steaming new island of barren rock and ice where the inhabitants lived in huts, wore sealskins and ate whale blubber. Of course, I've never been there and I have to thank David Attenborough and TV documentaries for my jaundiced view.
What is fact, though, is that in recent times Iceland has expanded its fishing grounds and protected them so aggressively that Royal Navy warships had to be deployed.
We agreed to acknowledge a 12-mile exclusion zone around Iceland, then a 50-mile zone and then agreed to limit fish catches.
The young upstarts then wanted a 200-mile exclusion zone and its boats fired shots at, rammed and attempted to board British vessels. Catches and gear were confiscated.
Britain showed great control when it could have swatted this irritation away like an annoying gnat, sacrificing instead the livelihoods of 2,000 British trawlermen and thousands more onshore and paying out millions in compensation.
So, no surprise now then that Brits are once again getting short shrift from Icelanders with short memories, including us by virtue of the 32 million of your cash that Norfolk County Council had invested with their failing banks.
As well as the really huge question mark now hanging over how wise it was to leave this cash there, you might also wonder how it is that the council is always pleading poverty but has millions stashed away in off-shore accounts?
Now there are calls for the British Government to treat councils in the same way as it is private investors with Icelandic banks, and use public funds to help bail them out.
For starters I think it's wrong for our money to be paid to investors, private or commercial, in a foreign bank over which our Government has no jurisdiction. That powerlessness is clearly demonstrated now, with Iceland telling us to go, run, jump... again... while at the same time taking good care of its own and then having the cheek to blame us for their most recent and final banking collapse with a charge of being "unfriendly".
All a bit rich from a country ranked the most developed in the world by the United Nations' Human Development Index and one of the most egalitarian.
Secondly, for the Government to cover the county council's Icelandic losses, it would have to use public money (your money) to replace the lost cash (your money). In other words, robbing Peter to pay... Peter.
And there must be a limit to how many billions of your money can be devoted to this cause. In fact, where is it all coming from?
Meanwhile, savings, pensions, stocks, shares continue to fall, and the longer the worrying decline continues the angrier I grow as more information emerges about the behaviour of city fat-cats worldwide whose greed and near-criminal behaviour has brought us to the brink of bankruptcy.
The most paper-shuffling culpable, in charge of banks showing the biggest losses, have been, at the same time, lining their own pockets with massive and largely-undeserved bonuses based on unregulated practices which encourage short-term risk-taking, not with their own money but for their own personal gain.
City slickers escape penalty-free and the Government finds itself in the position of having to shore up the banks with public cash, unable to help innocent and upright investors without at the same time preserving the rotten institutions which have led to this ruination.
One would hope that, with billions of our cash buying us an interest in the banking system, there will be a clear-out and clean-up. Some undeserved cash needs to be reclaimed, some system needs to be devised to punish and protect, there must be an end to massive bonus payouts and an end to financial encouragements leading towards bad practice.
Short-selling rumour mongers who act without conscience and with the single motive of personal greed for the least effort must be rooted out and systems put in place to end this damaging, damnable, contemptuous and corrupt money-making method whose victims are the hard-working and thrifty.
And while the Government's digging deep to help bank investors, what about insurance investors? Millions who invested in this industry now face difficulties in paying off their much-vaunted endowment mortgages? Is there a difference?
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Weather for King's Lynn
Monday 28 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 10 C to 24 C
Wind Speed: 10 mph
Wind direction: North
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: 9 C to 16 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: North east
