A false market in HBOS & RBS shares during Glenrothes by-election

I was going to write about another Nuttall gaffe on the 5 pm radio 4 programme last night querying the inspection frequency of Cumbria bridges. An incredulous engineer and interviewer explained in words of one syllable to Nuttall that the inspection frequency of two years was the recommended one and had nothing to do with the disaster. That was caused by extraordinary water flows. Nuttall then went on that a lot of these failed bridges were very old. That makes the engineer's point! These bridges had stood for hundreds of years. It shows how exceptional the conditions were. Some Roman bridges have stood for 2000 years. Nuttall gets the wrong end of the stick yet again. Old bridges were built stronger and more durably than modern bridges. Look at Brunel's GWR bridges. Nuttall is supposed to have a history degree. Some degree that must be!

More important is today's revelation that last Autumn, HBOS and RBS were propped up by secret Bank of England, HMG guaranteed, loans of £61.6bn! Wow, still no mention of the crucial Glenrothes by-election that if Labour had lost would have forced Brown's resignation. Many thousands of HBOS and RBS employees lived in Glenrothes and commute to Edinburgh over the Forth bridge. Had RBS and HBOS gone bust there would have been huge redundancies and Brown would probably not even have stood again for Dunfermline that adjoins Glenrothes. I wrote about this under-reported factor in my blog last year.

Darling Brown will claim this was needed to save the banking system. That was a minor factor in their calculations. Brown was saving his own skin. That's modern UK politics for you.

Worse, it now appears the Llyods directors, wooed by Brown with the waiving of compettion rules to take over HBOS and save Brown's bacon, were informed of these covert BoE loans to HBOS and did not pass on the information to their shareholders whom they were asking to vote through the takeover! So the shareholders were conned into taking over a failed bank HBOS and ruining their own solvent profitable bank Llyods TSB. This sets a new nadir in arrogance and deceit by the banking elite!

Political elite, banking elite always come out on top and poor Joe Public picks up the bill.