More banking scandals to come, admits Treasury Minister Andrea Leadsom

Andrew Grice in The Independent

More scandals in the financial sector are in the pipeline, the Treasury Minister responsible for the City of London has admitted.

Andrea Leadsom, who previously worked in banking and finance for 25 years, warned that there were more "cringeworthy announcements" to come and that there was "still a lot of baggage" in the financial industry.

Ms Leadsom, who held senior roles at Barclays and Invesco Perpetual before becoming an MP, told the parliamentary magazine The House there was still a long way to go change the City’s culture. Asked whether it is learning the lessons of the financial crisis, she replied: "I would say that at the top echelons of the banks, absolutely. But I think there's quite a long way to go to really change the culture. I think it did become very transaction-oriented and I think it will take time to recover that. I think we are still going to see a lot of cringeworthy announcements."

She admitted that when she heard about the Libor interbank lending rate scandal, she thought: “Well, if Libor is rigged, then what wasn’t rigged?”

Mrs Leadsom said: "We've had a number of issues over bank wrongdoing. There are inquiries going on, there are some pretty serious allegations out there, we've still got PPI going on. There are still things happening and redress under way. So it's quite difficult to just forget about that and move on. There's still a lot of baggage.”

Shortly after she was appointed Treasury Economic Secretary in April, The Independent revealed that she had previously used trusts to reduce her potential tax bill and offshore banking arrangements for her buy-to-let property company.

In the interview, Ms Leadsom declined to say whether she would vote in favour of the HS2 project - even though it is championed by her Treasury boss George Osborne. It would affect her South Northamptonshire constituency and while she is a backbencher, she opposed the Bill paving the way for the scheme. “I’m absolutely firmly committed to getting decent compensation and mitigation for my constituents and I think there’s a long way to go yet,” she said.

She also departed slightly from the party line on Europe, saying that there might be case for leaving the EU. The founder of the Conservative Fresh Start project aimed at getting a better deal for the UK, she said: "Obviously [if there's] a nonsense reform that doesn't achieve anything, then it might be. But at the moment I've spent four years working extremely hard trying to find things that would make it worth staying in."

Ms Leadsom dismissed calls by Tory Eurosceptics for David Cameron to set out his shopping list of demands for the renegotiation of Britain’s membership terms.

Defending the controversial Help to Buy mortgage guarantee scheme, she said: “Overwhelmingly, it's achieving its aspiration of helping people to get their first home. I get many more letters from people saying 'I'm desperate to get a mortgage, why have you done this mortgage market review?' rather than people saying 'oh, you know, property prices are ridiculously high".

The Met's problem isn't bad apples, it's the whole barrel. Abolish it

After Stephen Lawrence, Ian Tomlinson and countless other scandals, it's clear the Metropolitan police is institutionally rotten. London deserves better

• 
• • Owen Jones
  • The Guardian, Sunday 9 March 2014 18.29 GMT

'It's all over for the Met.' Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

If hacking someone's voicemail is a gross invasion of privacy, what words are left to describe agents of the state with fake identities having sex with women they're spying on? One activist who had a child with the undercover police officer Bob Lambert has offered four words: "raped by the state". She is among a group of women activists currently fighting attempts by the Met to sabotage their quest for truth and justice. If phone hacking provoked anger, the use of police spies should chill.

But police spies stealing the identities of dead children and duplicitously sharing the homes, beds and lives of women is only the latest in a string of damning scandals about the Metropolitan police: Stephen Lawrence, and the Macpherson report's subsequent conclusion that the Met is institutionally racist; a stop-and-search policy that discriminates against black people; deaths in police custody; the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes; the unlawful killing of Ian Tomlinson; the treatment of protesters as social problems to be contained; the stitching up of a Tory heavyweight.

Each scandal is examined in isolation, treated as the action of rogue officers. But together they suggest an institutionally rotten system. Londoners need a force devoted to protecting their security, which treats all sections of the community equally, and which enjoys the consent and trust of everyone. Currently they do not have one, and so it must be built on new foundations.

This is a suggestion that will infuriate some, not least Met officers. Easy for a columnist, issuing grand proclamations behind the safety of his desk. Met officers, on the other hand, are taking rapists and killers off the streets, putting their lives in danger as they do so. More than 3,000 British police officers are injured a year; about 800 seriously. But this is not about individuals: it's the system that is the problem, and it traps good and bad officers alike.

The government has finally announced an inquiry into police spies, driven on by the revelation that a police force supposed to be solving the murder of Stephen Lawrence was actually spying on his grieving family. But Doreen Lawrence is right to state that police failings go to "the highest level", and the Macpherson report's damning conclusion – that the Met is "institutionally racist" – is as true as ever.

 Doreen Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, 'is right to state that police failings go to the highest level'. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

I've never been randomly stopped and searched by a police officer, but I've met plenty of young black men who have. The experience varies: sometimes officers are almost apologetic, other times full of intimidation and aggression. The evidence shows that black people are significantly less likely to use drugs, and yet black Londoners are six times more likely to be stopped on suspicion of possession. It is difficult to conclude that this is anything but racism.

It is not just black Londoners who have described the Met as "the biggest gang around here": senior officers have self-described as such. "You might have 100 people in your gang," publicly declared Chief Inspector Ian Kibblewhite, of Enfield police, in 2012. "We have 32,000 people in our gang. It's called the Metropolitan police." But a "gang" does not serve a community: it has a turf, a demand for prestige and status, a desire to smash enemies.

When Andrew Mitchell was stitched up by Met officers, the lesson was frightening and instructive. The number of officers involved – including PC Keith Wallis, jailed for falsely claiming to have witnessed the infamous bicycle incident – must give pause to those who think it is a story of "bad apples". If an upper-middle-class Conservative cabinet minister can be stitched up, what hope for the rest of us? It is a point he has passionately and rightly made himself.

A story of conspiracy and cover-up is all too familiar, although other victims do not enjoy anything approaching the power and influence of a Conservative chief whip. There have been 82 black and minority ethnic deaths following contact with the Metropolitan police since 1990, and not a single successful prosecution. Among them is Sean Rigg, a black musician who died in Brixton police station in 2008; four years later, an inquest jury found that police had used unnecessary force against him. It was in stark contrast to initial police claims, and – after a prolonged fight by Rigg's family – three officers were arrested on suspicion of perjury.

When the newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson died after being thrown to the ground in 2009 at the G20 protests by PC Simon Harwood, the initial police narrative – faithfully repeated by so many news outlets – blamed protesters, claiming that officers coming to his help were bombarded with "bricks, bottles and planks of wood". It was all lies, and symptomatic of a force that saw protest as something that had to be contained, not facilitated. Young people had been patronised as the apathetic "X Factor generation": when they mobilised on the streets, they were met with batons and kettles.

What would a new police force look like? That should be left to a royal commission – headed by an independent figure, not an establishment patsy – which calls evidence from all sections of the community. Structures, training, forms of accountability: all need to be designed from scratch. It needs to be a body stripped of prejudice and bigotry, that defends hard-won democratic freedoms, as well as protecting people's security. It is all over for the Met, and time to debate the police force that London deserves.

Bilderberg 2013 comes to … the Grove hotel, Watford

 

The Bilderberg group's meeting will receive greater scrutiny than usual as journalists and bloggers converge on Watford

• Charlie Skelton
• The Guardian, Sunday 2 June 2013 17.03 BST

Protesters at Bilderberg 2012. This year's meeting of the global elite is in Watford and is expected to be unusually open. Photograph: Mark Gail/The Washington Post

When you're picking a spot to hold the world's most powerful policy summit, there's really only one place that will do: Watford. I guess the Seychelles must have been booked up.

On Thursday afternoon, a heady mix of politicians, bank bosses, billionaires, chief executives and European royalty will swoop up the elegant drive of the Grove hotel, north of Watford, to begin the annual Bilderberg conference.

It's a remarkable spectacle – one of nature's wonders – and the most exciting thing to happen to Watford since that roundabout on the A412 got traffic lights. The area round the hotel is in lockdown: locals are having to show their passports to get to their homes. It's exciting too for the delegates. The CEO of Royal Dutch Shell will hop from his limo, delighted to be spending three solid days in policy talks with the head of HSBC, the president of Dow Chemical, his favourite European finance ministers and US intelligence chiefs. The conference is the highlight of every plutocrat's year and has been since 1954. The only time Bilderberg skipped a year was 1976, after the group's founding chairman,Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, was caught taking bribes from Lockheed Martin.

It may seem odd, as our own lobbying scandal unfolds, amid calls for a statutory register of lobbyists, that a bunch of our senior politicians will be holed up for three days in luxurious privacy with the chairmen and CEOs of hedge funds, tech corporations and vast multinational holding companies, with zero press oversight. "It runs contrary to [George] Osborne's public commitment in 2010 to 'the most radical transparency agenda the country has ever seen'," says Michael Meacher MP. Meacher describes the conference as "an anti-democratic cabal of the leaders of western market capitalism meeting in private to maintain their own power and influence outside the reach of public scrutiny".

But, to be fair, is "public scrutiny" really necessary when our politicians are tucked safely away with so many responsible members of JP Morgan's international advisory board? There's always the group chief executive of BP on hand to make sure they do not get unduly lobbied. And if he is not in the room, keeping an eye out, then at least one of the chairmen of Novartis, Zurich Insurance, Fiat or Goldman Sachs International will be around.

This year, there will be a great deal more "public scrutiny" of Bilderberg. Pressure from journalists and activists has won concessions from the venue: for the first time in 59 years there will be an unofficial press office, staffed by volunteers, on the grounds. Several thousand activists and bloggers are expected, along with photographers and journalists from around the world.

Back in 2009 there were barely a dozen witnesses – harassed and arrested by heavy-handed Greek police. This year there is a press zone, police liaison, portable toilets, a snack van, a speakers' corner – all the ingredients for a different Bilderberg. A "festival feel" has been promised. If you are concerned about transparency or lobbying, Watford is the place to be next weekend. Whether the delegates reach out to the press and public remains to be seen. Don't forget, they've got their hands full carrying out the good works of Bilderberg. The conference is, after all, run as a charity.

If you've been wondering who picks up the tab for this gigantic conference and security operation, the answer arrived last week, on a pdf file sent round by Anonymous. It showed that the Bilderberg conference is paid for, in the UK, by an officially registered charity: the Bilderberg Association (charity number 272706).

According to its Charity Commission accounts, the association meets the "considerable costs" of the conference when it is held in the UK, which include hospitality costs and the travel costs of some delegates. Presumably the charity is also covering the massive G4S security contract. Fortunately, the charity receives regular five-figure sums from two kindly supporters of its benevolent aims: Goldman Sachs and BP. The most recent documentary proof of this is from 2008 (pdf), since when the charity has omitted its donors' names (pdf) from its accounts.

The charity's goal is "public education". And how does it go about educating the public? "In furtherance of these objectives the International Steering Committee organises conferences and meetings in the UK and elsewhere and disseminates the results thereof by preparing and publishing reports of such conferences and meetings and by other means." Cleverly, it disseminates the results by resolutely keeping them away from the public and press.

The charity is overseen by its three trustees (pdf): Bilderberg steering committee member and serving minister Kenneth Clarke MP; Lord Kerr of Kinlochard; and Marcus Agius, the former chairman of Barclays who resigned over the Libor scandal.

Labour MP Tom Watson remarks: "If the allegations that a cabinet minister sits on the board of a charity that discreetly funds a secretive conference of elites are true then I hope the prime minister was informed. It was David Cameron who heralded the new age of transparency. I hope he asks Kenneth Clarke to adhere to these principles in future." At the very least, George Osborne and Clarke may consider adhering to the ministerial code when it comes to Bilderberg and declare it in their list of "meetings with proprietors, editors and senior media executives" as they've failed to do in the past. Of course, with the lobbying scandal in full spate it's possible our ministers will steer clear of such a major corporate lobbying event. We'll find out on Thursday.

Burn the orchard,re-grow cricket

P Sainath in The Hindu

Getting Mr. Srinivasan to walk the plank is desirable, but won’t rescue Indian cricket. Scrap the BCCI, whole hog, and start over

Isn’t it reassuring to learn how many men of character the Board of Control for Cricket in India has? With the secretary and the treasurer resigning their posts, joined by the IPL chairman as well, and more lining up to quit on noble principle? Conscience crawls out of the mothballs by the hour.

The BCCI-Indian Premier League would love to retain what they have — minus N. Srinivasan. They’re working on an “exit formula” to toss their much reviled chief overboard. We can then witness a withdrawal of resignations amidst a celebration of principle and probity. While getting Mr. Srinivasan to walk the plank is desirable, it won’t cleanse the BCCI, the IPL, or cricket.

So now we know it wasn’t a few bad apples but a whole rotten orchard. The “just three cricketers,” defence was always dishonest. The rot engulfs the entire edifice of the IPL and the BCCI. The media have a ball-by-ball commentary going on this sordid Reality show: The Hunt for Srini’s Scalp. It’s entertaining too, with even an element of suspense. You never know who the next man in will be, with players in this game switching teams on field. And then there’s Sharad Pawar sending down googlies to himself on the sidelines. Yesterday’s Srinivasan loyalists could be the spearhead of today’s attack on him. Sanjay Jagdale, Ajay Shirke and Rajiv Shukla— who’ve just quit their BCCI posts — seem to be warming up for a bowl.

That Mr. Srinivasan should not head the BCCI (or anything involving the public interest) was apparent years ago. That is, to anyone whose perception was not modified by lucrative contracts with, or advertising revenue from, the BCCI-IPL. However, it’s crazy to believe his exit will set everything right. He will be replaced by his own recent collaborators. The kind who helped reduce a national passion to a hyper-commercial freak show. Take a bow, Pawar saheb.

The BCCI-IPL have faced serious charges for a while. For instance, from the Enforcement Directorate. Ensconced in London, the IPL’s founder is a fugitive from justice. Then came this BCCI chief whose conflict of interest was made ‘legal’ by changing the body’s rules. (Take another bow, Pawar saheb). Mr. Srinivasan owning an IPL team while heading the BCCI only now gets the attention it demanded years ago. As for Mr. Pawar, his notable achievement in UPA-I was to rack up more frequent flier miles on overseas travel in the name of Indian cricket than for agriculture.

This April, an irate Bombay High Court told the IPL crowd to pay up the amount they owed the Maharashtra police for security provided during their matches. The dues, the government of Maharashtra said, were “around Rs. 9 crore. The Bench also said the law permits government to attach the properties of the defaulters.

Forget the dues, the IPL earlier made money from the state. It got over Rs. 20 crore in entertainment tax waivers from the government of Maharashtra, the gains going to Mukesh Ambani, Vijay Mallya, Shah Rukh Khan and others in need. Until an outraged Bombay High Court ordered recovery of that money. Meanwhile, state-owned stadia are still given out to the BCCI-IPL at throwaway rates.

What does one do with the BCCI?

Dissolve it. Scrap the BCCI and start afresh. Have a public audit of this body’s activities over the past decade. The BCCI is characterised by its contempt for the public interest. By the impunity it could act with, confident of its power, corporate, political and media. Start over. Build and launch a body that is transparent and accountable. A body that runs the Indian team must be accountable to the public and the country in whose name it acts.

The IPL isn’t just about spot-fixing or betting. It is about the hyper-commercialization of a beautiful game to a point where it destroys the soul of that sport. It’s about structured sleaze and a corrupting culture. Every dodgy defence of the IPL holds aloft that catch-all excuse: commercial success. This, in their eyes, outweighs its “few flaws.” Yet, the cloud that the Sreesanths and Meiyappans have come under is no aberration. It is the standard product of such a system.

It isn’t just the BCCI brass who have suddenly spotted disaster. Take the dominant media that daily celebrates its latest exclusives on the scandals. The same media lionized the IPL, season after season. Whose pundits, with a few honourable exceptions, stuck to the defence and promotion of the IPL culture.

They even briefly went with the franchisees’ claim: “Our security was so tight, owners could not enter the dugouts. Bookies had no chance of being there.” They didn’t need to be. The paid-entry late-night parties were a cosy access zone for fixers, bookies and worse.

Sure, the media’s pressure at this point is a very good thing. But almost every exposé of fixing, betting or dubious deals has come from official agencies. From the Delhi and Mumbai police, from the Enforcement Directorate. Any good stories that came out of journalistic investigation before that were quickly brushed aside by a media revelling in the IPL culture. TV channels had many panellists — including legendary cricketers — extolling the glories of the IPL while being on its payroll. There were even former players accused in earlier fixing scandals. But the advertisers and sponsors till now delighted with this con-job, today worry that the “brand equity of the IPL has taken a beating.”

Well, Indian cricket has taken a worse beating.

The media helped build a make-believe world that allowed no serious critique of the IPL. Any criticism was met by: “Don’t let’s hurt cricket just because of a few small problems here.” Such words falsely conflate the interests of the IPL with those of Indian cricket. Their interests are worlds apart.

What has been the IPL’s contribution to Indian cricket?

It changed the axis, orientation, content and soul of Indian cricket. It privatised a national passion, promoted a corrupting commerce. The game is now “owned” by companies, corporate sharks and their political patrons, film stars, advertisers and sponsors. No longer by the cricketing public.

The domestic circuit that was the feeder system for India’s international teams is hurting. The Indian greats came up through it. But now it is the feeder for the IPL. Why play in the Ranji Trophy (except to get noticed by the recruiters) when you can make millions playing sub-standard cricket in the League? The IPL has not contributed a single great player to Indian cricket.

The “few rotten apples” line was always a fraud. And we need to do what orchardists do on rare occasions. Burn the orchard and plant for fresh growth. Scrap the BCCI and start over. Re-grow cricket.

Sticking with those analogies, what happens to the waste you have to get rid of? The net is full of websites running advice on that. The United States Environmental Protection Agency has some suggestions, for instance. Including “burning, chipping, shredding, grinding, composting or use as hog fuel.” Isn’t that tempting?

You can’t blame capitalism for this 'shambles’

Real free markets require genuine competition if they are to offer the constantly improving quality of service that is the redeeming virtue of private enterprise

A protester makes his point in front of the Bank of England Photo: GETTY

By Janet Daley

9:00PM BST 21 Jul 2012

What a feast the past week has been for the last adherents of the old socialist religion. There was yet another banking scandal and this one actually involved (wow!) laundering of drug money, and possible terrorist connections. And then there was a whopperoo of a public relations catastrophe, when a private firm’s commitment to providing security for the Olympics fell apart. So here we go again. From the planet where state power and government provision is an eternal fount of benevolence, come the voices of reproach. They always knew it would end like this: the forces of rabid capitalism have been allowed to pillage and destroy the moral fabric of the nation with their rapacious lust for profit, laying waste to the great public service ethos which once ruled our communal life.

Thank heaven for Mark Serwotka. Just as this outpouring of egregious moral hokum was reaching its ululating zenith, along came the Public and Commercial Services Union to remind us what the “public service ethos” is all about. Mr Serwotka’s comrades, who hold the security of the entire country in their grip, were to pull the plug at Britain’s ports of entry on the day before the Olympic Games opened. Ah, yes. There is the spirit of the untrammelled, invincible public sector at its purest: self-serving, politically ruthless, and indifferent to any needs or concerns outside its own vested interest. This was the mindset that once prevailed in the government-owned public services, with their hugely powerful national unions, which dominated our day-to-day existence within living memory.

Those of us old enough to recall what it was actually like to be persecuted by the North Thames Gas Board, to be put on a six-month waiting list for a telephone by the General Post Office, and to be at the mercy of dustmen who went on strike whenever their feelings were hurt, are not likely to be taken in by meretricious rhetoric about the glories of state ownership. It was the blinding rage against all of that – and the determination that it should never return – that kept the Conservatives in power for 18 years.

But I worry about the youngsters. Could a whole new generation of useful idiots be recruited to the cause of collectivism and state ownership, bamboozled by deliberately muddled assertions which do not stand up to examination? Will they be inclined, for example, to accept the hysterical claims that HSBC’s alleged money-laundering activity is a revelation about the nature of capitalism itself: that it encapsulates the essential immorality of the free market? Perhaps it would be pertinent for someone (David Cameron?) to point out that laundering drug money is not capitalism. It is not even “rampant capitalism”: it is a crime.

Freedom – as in “free market” – is not the same as lawlessness. If bankers are criminals, they should go to prison. It is the careless enforcement of the law – or a lack of the transparency which makes such enforcement possible – which should be in the dock here, not free-market economics. To consign capitalism to the devil because criminal activity went on within it is absurd. We may as well ban the ownership of goods because it creates the possibility of theft. Criminality is a danger under any system, because it is a function of human frailty. The point is to pursue and eradicate a particular crime, not to smash the freedoms under which it was conceivable. What is needed now is diligence and discipline in the running of markets – which brings us to that other great embarrassment for the private sector.

The word that has been uttered more than any other throughout the week (with much self-important pomposity in some cases) has been “shambles”. Yes, the failure of G4S to provide the security staff which they were contracted to recruit was indeed a four-star mega-shambles. But so was the Government’s failure to monitor the slipshod way that its contractor was managing such a vital programme. And for that matter, so was George Osborne’s last Budget, and the Coalition’s catastrophic attempt to hammer Lords reform through Parliament, and the BBC’s coverage of the Diamond Jubilee. Yes sir, “shambles” is the word of the moment – and it applies as much to amateurish, incompetent, self-indulgent government or national institutions as it does to hapless private companies that make very public messes.

This is the real British disease: unseriousness, lack of rigour, ill-discipline, failure to attend to detail and inadequate follow-through. Certainly it is true that what is now called “outsourcing” of public services – the disgraced Public Finance Initiative or public-private partnership – has taken a lot of hits. It has sometimes (but not always, as the neo-nationalisers would have you believe) ended up costing more and delivering less than it should. But that is almost wholly the fault of government agencies (both central and local) that are hopeless at commissioning and monitoring contractors. Getting value for money and insisting on efficiency are so alien to the mentality of public bureaucrats that they are far more inclined simply to hand over responsibility to outside firms and wait for them to perform miracles. Labour did this with the clear intention of fudging Whitehall spending limits so that it could pour even more money into its benefit entitlement programmes. The Tories do it in better faith but with less excuse for sloppy management: they are the people whose backgrounds ought to have taught them that private contractors need to be chased, harried and held to the mark.

But then the Tory record on privatisation has not been covered in glory. It will not do, for example, to dismantle a state monopoly in telecommunications only to hand it to a private monopoly. BT may not make you wait six months for a telephone, but they will rip you off with the joyous alacrity of a company that knows it has no effective competitors. Nor should the old gas and electricity boards have been stripped of their power only for energy supply to be run by a cartel of price-fixing giants. Real free markets require genuine competition if they are to offer the constantly improving quality of service that is the redeeming virtue of private enterprise. Otherwise private provision will seem like a profit-obsessed conspiracy against the public – hardly an improvement on the old nationalised industries, which had become comical in their failure to serve the consumer by the time the country threw them out. There is no time left for inept, half-hearted, inadequate administration. The argument against state power could be lost – and then another generation will have to learn the lesson all over again.

The UK Banking Fraud

Libor scandal: gunfight on Threadneedle Street

This is not just some common or garden mishap or even misbehaviour at a big business. This is 'fraud'

• Editorial
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 17 July 2012 20.50 BST

Only two weeks into the market-rigging scandal and already the economic-policy establishment resembles the final scene of Reservoir Dogs: a bunch of men in suits all blindly shooting at each other.

Former Barclays boss Bob Diamond has landed the Bank of England's Paul Tucker in deep trouble, with a note implying that he encouraged the misreporting of money-market rates. Barclays' ex-chief operating officer Jerry del Missier told MPs this week that Mr Diamond ordered him to fiddle Libor rates. And Barclays was accused by theFinancial Services Authority (FSA) on Monday of a "culture of gaming – and gaming us". The FSA has been dumped in it by Mervyn King, who argued on Tuesday that it was not the Bank's job to regulate Libor – the implication being that it was the FSA's fault. Both the FSA and the Bank agree that prime responsibility for monitoring Libor lay with the British Bankers' Association. And then there is George Osborne, whose main contribution to the chaos has been to suggest to a magazine interviewer that Gordon Brown and his lieutenants are somehow to blame.

This is the British economic-policy establishment under unprecedented pressure – and what an unseemly, blame-ducking, buck-passing panic it presents. Not just the humbling of some of our most senior and respected officials but also the erraticism with which they have been making policy. Take, for instance, the ousting of Bob Diamond. The FSA's Adair Turner told MPs this week that when he spoke to the Barclays chairman Marcus Agius after the Libor scandal, he had expected Mr Diamond to walk the plank. Something was obviously lost in translation, however, because Mr Agius stood down instead. It took the intercession of Mervyn King to force out the Barclays chief executive. And why exactly was Mr Diamond pushed out? Not for any direct involvement in the Libor scandal but, in the words of Mr King yesterday: "They [the bank] have been sailing too close to the wind across a wide number of areas." No actual infraction; just a general sense of having gone too far for too long. This raises the question of why no regulator seriously intervened in Barclays before the Libor scandal. Bob Diamond has been head of one of Britain's biggest banks since January 2011, yet no official has brought up a previous incident where they told the board to change their behaviour or their personnel. The impression left is of rather rough justice. As Andrew Tyrie, head of the Treasury select committee, drily observed in the same session, by that measure every chief executive in the land is "only a couple of bad dinners" away from being forced out of a post.

This is not just some common or garden mishap or even misbehaviour at a big business. As Mr King observed on Tuesday, this is "fraud". And it has not just been carried out by Barclays, but by a string of other financial institutions – who between them fiddled the benchmark interest rates that are used as reference for hundreds of billions of pounds' worth of transactions. Some of the commentary about this scandal has brought up the fact that this occurred during the credit crunch in 2008, when it would apparently have been in everyone's interests to pretend that all was normal in money markets. Maybe, except that this scamming took place over at least four years – and the kindest interpretation of the evidence to date is that officials asked barely any questions. In place of supervision there was what looks like worrying chumminess. "Well done, man. I am really, really proud of you," Mr Diamond emailed the number two at the Bank on his promotion in December 2008. Mr Tucker replied: "You've been an absolute brick."

This story has so far revolved around one bank rigging one set of interest rates, involving emails and letters and committee hearings. Imagine what a serious, wide-ranging inquiry could uncover. Britain certainly needs one, because this blossoming scandal threatens not just the reputation of an industry but the regulators and ministers who let it run riot.

It's not about sex

Pritish Nandy
20 November 2011, 03:02 PM IST

Sex is as much a part of politics as of life. So sex scandals never bother me. You see them everywhere. Sometimes, open and brazen, as in the case of Silvio. Most times, they are sneaky and covert as in Narain Dutt Tiwari's case. But whatever they are, these sex scandals expose our own hypocrisy. Why on earth would we expect our leaders to be saints and, if not saints, celibates? Are they pursuing a profession or a religious order? If they are our representatives, they will have all our faults and foibles as well.

The truth is: People today have illicit sex all the time, and many among us have it among our own gender. No one quite knows how this promiscuity came about. Some blame popular culture. Others say, our popular culture merely mirrors the way we actually are. It's stupid to expect that our politicians will be any different from us. If they were, it will only make them worse. If you ask me, it's their sexual pursuits that make them human. Take that out and all you are left with is just greed: An obsessive greed for money and power. Grabbed, not earned.

So what bothers me is not sex. Not even sleaze. For one man's sleaze is another's pleasure. What bothers me is where many of these sexual encounters eventually lead. They seldom remain just encounters between consenting adults, as all sex ought to be, licit or illicit. They spiral down into a dark hell of depravity, violence and crime. Crime so brutal that the sexual part  of it seems like just a minor distraction.

The abduction and possible murder of Bhanwri Devi, a small town nurse who was having an affair with a minister, recently caused so much upheaval that the Rajasthan Chief Minister had to dump his entire cabinet. The Gehlot ministry was never much known for its rectitude and efficiency. But what dropped it wasn't its corruption or its ineptitude. What dropped it was a horrible story of deceit, extortion, abduction, and (in all likelihood) murder. For Bhanwri Devi, who was in the eye of the storm, is now missing and was last seen abducted by hired goons with a contract to kill. 

It's not just Bhanwri Devi. Every day you read about many such cases. The starting point may be sex. Or sexual attraction. But where it leads to is unspeakable hell. Acid attacks. Slashing. Abductions. Brutal violence. Khap incited murders. It is one endless spiral of horror with each story worse than the other. At the heart of it all is just one obsession: Sexual dominance. Power.

What disturbs me is the fact that sex, one of the most wonderful things India taught the world to celebrate, is now just another instrument of power men keep using to harass, intimidate, dominate, and commit violence on women. So girls wearing jeans are attacked outside their colleges. So are girls drinking in bars. Or out on dates. When the men accompanying them try to resist, they are stabbed, murdered. Mumbai is still reeling under the impact of the ghastly killing of two young men, Keenan and Reuben, who tried to protect their girlfriends from being molested by a bunch of local hoods. There is that horrible case of a policeman who picked up a college girl on Marine Drive where she was sitting with one of her classmates and raped her in the police chowky right there, in broad daylight.

No, it has nothing to do with sex. This is about power. Sex is only a pretext. The obsession with power leads to such disgusting, violent crime. It shows how perverse our notion of manhood is, how emasculated we are as men that we seek to prove our manhood by attacking helpless women. Or try to disempower them by idiotic laws that seek to prevent them from working in bars beyond 9 pm. As the demand for greater representation in politics from women's groups grows, so does the violence. You see it even in the virtual world these days. Women are constantly harassed, intimidated, stalked on the net.

But don't discredit sex for this. Discredit the genes that make us men believe every woman is easy game. And when she says no, she must be taught a lesson. No, it's never about sex. It's only about power. And the abuse of power is what politics is all about.

Hacking scandal: is this Britain's Watergate?

 

By Oliver Wright, Ian Burrell, Martin Hickman, Cahal Milmo and Andrew Grice

Saturday, 9 July 2011

David Cameron was forced to cut Rupert Murdoch and his newspaper empire loose from the heart of government yesterday as he tried to deflect public anger about his failure to tackle the phone-hacking scandal.
Mr Cameron turned on Mr Murdoch's son James, saying there were questions "that need to be answered" about his role during the phone-hacking cover-up, and criticising him for not accepting the resignation of News International's chief executive Rebekah Brooks.

He also admitted that his desire to win support from the company's newspapers had led him to turn "a blind eye" as evidence grew of widespread illegality at the News of the World.

With a newspaper closed, five arrests and more to follow, 4,000 possible victims, a media empire shaken to its foundations and the Prime Minister reeling, the escalating scandal has become a controversy comparable to the US Watergate saga, with ramifications for Downing Street, the media and police.

Last night the media regulator Ofcom announced it would contact police about the conduct of Mr Murdoch's empire in covering up phone-hacking allegations, to determine whether it was a "fit and proper" owner of the broadcaster BSkyB, which Mr Murdoch is attempting to buy outright. He is due to fly into London today to deal with the crisis, according to reports. Shares in the broadcaster fell by eight per cent.
 
In a day of further dramatic developments it emerged that:
 
*Police are investigating allegations that a News International (NI) executive deleted millions of emails from an internal archive, in an apparent attempt to obstruct inquiries into phone hacking.
 
*Andy Coulson was arrested on suspicion of bribing police officers and conspiracy to phone hack, and Clive Goodman, the NOTW's former royal correspondent, was held in a dawn raid on suspicion of bribing police officers. Both were bailed. A 63-year-old man, thought to be a private investigator, was also arrested in Surrey.
 
*Mr Cameron's most senior officials were warned before the last election about connections between Mr Coulson and Jonathan Rees, a private investigator paid up to £150,000 a year to illegally trawl for personal information. But Mr Cameron appointed Mr Coulson as his director of communications.
 
*A judge-led public inquiry will take place to investigate phone hacking. Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch are prepared to give evidence on phone hacking under oath.
 
*Ms Brooks was stripped of control of NI's internal investigation and faced calls for her resignation from the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
 
*Wapping sources warned of worse phone-hacking revelations to come.

At a Downing Street press conference, Mr Cameron defended his decision to appoint Mr Coulson but admitted his relationship with senior members of the Murdoch empire had been too close.

"The deeper truth is this... because party leaders were so keen to win the support of newspapers we turned a blind eye to the need to sort this issue, get on top of the bad practices, to change the way our newspapers are regulated," he said. "I want to deal with it."

Mr Cameron said he now thought it was wrong to keep Ms Brooks at the company: "It has been reported that she offered her resignation over this and in this situation, I would have taken it."

Mr Cameron was also asked whether James Murdoch remained a fit and proper person to run a large company, following his admission yesterday that he personally approved out-of-court payments in a way which he now accepted was wrong. The Prime Minister replied: "I read the statement yesterday. I think it raises lots of questions that need to be answered and these processes that are under way are going to have to answer those questions."

Mr Cameron announced two inquires: one to deal with phone hacking and the failure of the police to properly investigate it, and another into press regulation. He said it was clear that the Press Complaints Commission had failed and the second inquiry would bringing forward proposals for an independent body.

Asked what enquiries he had made before employing Andy Coulson, the Prime Minister said: "Obviously I sought assurances, I received assurances. I commissioned a company to do a basic background check."

But the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said Mr Cameron was still failing to restore confidence in the Government's handling of the scandal: "This is a Prime Minister who clearly still doesn't get it. He is ploughing on regardless on BSkyB. He failed to apologise for the catastrophic mistake of bringing Andy Coulson into the heart of government.

"His wholly unconvincing answers of what he knew and when he knew it about Mr Coulson's activities undermine his ability to lead the change Britain needs."

Asked if Mrs Brooks should consider her position, Mr Clegg told The Independent: "Yes. The whole senior management has to ask how it could have presided over this without appearing to know what was going on. Someone somewhere higher up the food chain needs to be held to account. You can't just ask journalists, secretaries, photographers and low-paid office workers to carry the can for a failure, on James Murdoch's own admission, of corporate governance."
 
Watergate Parallels
 
The Watergate and phone-hacking scandals had small beginnings – a break-in at a hotel, and a single "rogue" reporter and private detective. The News of the World scandal is not just about phone hacking. It is also about statements made to Parliament, personally to David Cameron, and in a court of law which – as James Murdoch has now admitted – were not true. As with Watergate, which brought down Richard Nixon's presidency, the cover-up could have bigger implications than the original offence.

The great age of Britain's popular press is drawing squalidly to its close

by Ian Jack in The Guardian

Who will mourn the passing of the News of the World? The staff will, especially those not recruited by the Sun on Sunday. A pure-minded lover of Pakistani cricket might, thanking "the fake sheikh" for exposing the national team's easy corruption. This week everyone hates the News of the World, and yet only last Sunday around 2.6 million people liked it enough to buy a copy. They didn't mind what they were reading, so long as they didn't know how some of it came to be written. And they didn't mind that too much, either – if they knew about phone hacking, they overlooked it – until it came to the case of the abducted and then murdered girl, Milly Dowler.

We own what the Victorians knew as our baser selves. When the News of the World first appeared in 1843, Britain was embarking on a long age of public respectability in which salacious accounts of sex and violence were hard to find. The News of the World made this a specialism, mainly by reporting court cases no other paper would touch. The education acts of 1870 and 1880 spread literacy through every social class and hugely expanded the reading public. By 1914, the paper was selling a couple of million copies a week, all of them deliciously published on a day nominally devoted to worship and quiet reflection. In its peak year, 1949, the circulation averaged close to 8.5m and required not a parcels van or two but a whole train to take Scottish copies north from the presses in Manchester.

It was, by then, the world's biggest-selling newspaper – a publishing triumph owned by an English family, the Carrs, that exploited an otherwise unsatisfied appetite for sexual voyeurism and scandal. At 11 o'clock in church: remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Behind one's lavatory door at 12: Vicar Denies Weekend in Caravan. "As British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding," was how its then editor described his paper during the takeover battle of 1969 (and everyone knew that the loser, Robert Maxwell, was a Czech).

Whether hypocrisy is a peculiarly British vice is debatable; other societies may be just as two-faced in different ways. But understanding the difference between how people were supposed to be and how they actually were became a key weapon for the pioneers of British popular newspaper journalism when universal primary education delivered new audiences in the late 19th century. Social reformers and educationalists thought of reading in terms of self-improvement and a more skilled workforce – a moral and economic good. A new breed of newspaper publishers, of which Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) was by far the most inventive, saw a less worthy side. He spread the message to his staff like a preacher: roughly, to subvert the words of Philip Larkin, readers were forever surprising a hunger in themselves to be more trivial.
"Crime exclusives are noticed by the public more than any other sort of news," Northcliffe told his news editor at the Daily Mail, Tom Clarke, in 1921. "They attract attention, which is the secret of newspaper success. They are the sort of dramatic news the public always affects to criticise but is always in the greatest hurry to read. Watch the sales during a big murder mystery, especially if there is a woman in it. It is a revelation of how much the public is interested in realities, action and mystery. It is only human."

Northcliffe first put his "only human" principle to work as the 22-year-old editor-publisher of a little weekly, Answers to Correspondents, which told its readers how many MPs had glass eyes (three) or cork legs (one), and how tall Gladstone was (5ft 9ins!), and adjudicated debates over whether women lived longer than men and if snakes could kill pigs. Later he would say that his fortune had been founded on useless information, but by then he could afford to make jokes about his youth, having in the meantime launched the Daily Mail (1896) and the Daily Mirror (1903), and bought the Observer (1905) and the Times (1908). No one did more to shape the future of British journalism. Northcliffe divided news into two main divisions – reports of happenings and what he called "talking points", where his reporters would develop the topics people were discussing, or stimulate new ones. "What a great talking point," he told Clarke when he read that Paris had decided skirts should be long. "Every woman in the country will be excited about it. We must start an illustrated discussion on 'THE BATTLE OF THE SKIRTS: LONG v SHORT.' Get different people's views. Cable to New York and Paris, get plenty of sketches by well-known artists … print as many as you can … plenty of legs."

Such enterprising devotion to the frivolous – and to women – had never before been heard in a newspaper office. In this, he prefigured the modern British editor; similarly, his close relationships with politicians made him the model for the modern British proprietor. During the first world war he met a young Australian journalist, Keith Murdoch, and adopted him as a kind of editorial pupil. Promoted to an editorship in Melbourne, Murdoch emulated the maestro's techniques and forged his own political alliances, so much so he got the nickname Lord Southcliffe. His only son, Rupert, learned the trade at his knee.

Northcliffe had an unhappy end. He became paranoid and issued bewildering instructions that his staff, trained to oblige his imperiousness, never knew how to disobey. He appointed a Daily Mail concierge as the censor of advertisements, he saw two moons in the sky at Biarritz, at Boulogne he tried to push a railway porter into the sea. Perrier water became an obsession, and on the train from Dover to London he drank 13 bottles of it. (In the spirit of Answers, I can't resist the information that his brother, St John Harmsworth, bought the French spring that was then in the custody of a Dr Perrier. St John bottled the water in bottles shaped like Indian clubs and gave a few to Sir Thomas Lipton, which the grocery magnate pressed on King Edward VII, who gave Perrier a royal warrant. Bingo.)

He died under the supervision of two nurses in a hut on the roof of a house in Carlton Gardens. Neurosyphilis has always been strongly rumoured, but never proved. It was an organic psychosis of some sort, in a mind that had been unsteadied by power. In his last days, he ordered hundreds of sackings, but he had always been a brisk sacker: "My dear Tom Clarke, Fire [name deleted]. Chief" is a memo reproduced by Clarke in his fascinating memoir. An editor who said she wasn't to blame for her paper's criminal behaviour because she'd been on holiday at the time? Her feet (I like to think) would never have touched the ground.

For the moment Rebekah Brooks stays, but all around her the great age of Britain's popular press is tumbling squalidly to its close.