All in this together…?

What follows is offered up in the hope that someone more knowledgeable & resourceful than me will either confirm or discredit it with reference to some facts & sources. It’s just a line of argument I’ve been pushing here & there (twitter mostly) which I think, if true, needs airing often. I’ll keep it brief & high-level.

The dominant political narrative at the moment goes something like this:

• Pre-2008 a small elite in the banking industry enriched themselves via business practices & financial instruments that turned out to be massively flawed.
• Consequently the global economy crashed leaving governments to pick up the pieces & bail out various banks and institutions at great expense.
• In turn that  led to huge spending cuts impacting ordinary working people who weren’t responsible for those practices and didn’t benefit from them pre-2008.
• This is all unfair and needs addressed.

I know that’s simplistic but that’s the point – both David Cameron and everyone on the steps of St Paul’s would agree with every word and only once you got into the nuance and detail or the policy prescriptions needed to address it would the differences emerge

So here’s my – possibly erroneous and fact-free at the moment – rebuttal:

• The ‘benefits’ from those now discredited business practices didn’t just go to this ‘small elite’. Yes some people got ridiculously rich via them but the public purse was also hugely enriched and that benefited all.
• Or, to put it another way, imagine in the decade pre-crash government receipts didn’t include the corporation taxes & income taxes paid by these companies and the ‘elite’ who run them; would the ‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme have been anywhere near as well funded? Would the record investment in health spending have happened?

As I said at the top I don’t have the talent or time to trawl the ONS or Treasury website to validate or discredit any of this so if anyone has already done so – or would like to – I would really love to know.

It’s worth pointing out that my rebuttal is pretty ‘left/right neutral’ – you could accept it as a starting premise to argue for a wide range of solutions so this isn’t about which ‘side’ is right here. It doesn’t in anyway diminish the validity of calls for real banking reform, a more balanced economy etc. It just feels sensible, given how widely accepted that original premise is to make sure it’s accurate or call out any flaws, hence this plea for help.

Blogging silence will now resume….. ta.