Ö÷²¥´óÐã

It's the machines, stupid! :

in places like the channel isles funds can still operate with no audit or capital requirements. as long as people can still make holes in the financial hull how can it be refloated.

what benefit does another witch hunt serve when there are plenty of existing reports covering this?


e.g this sales pitch and then a conversation between 2 bankers over a client?

Blame can be split 70-30. 70% is the fault of the banks for dishing out credit cards, loans and mortgages too readily and investing badly in unstable areas. But the other 30% is the fault of the customers.

It's quite simple: banks and building societies hold customers' money and invest it to make more which then allows for interest, loans/credit etc and also of course, juicy bonuses. These days, very few people save up to buy something and choose instead to take out a loan or put it on a credit card. If no one is saving their money, the banks don't have it to spend and more must come from investment gain. And if the customer is daft enough to take accept a mortgage way over what they can afford, or max out three credit cards with holidays, cars, and the latest electronic equipment then they have to take some of the blame on themselves for the failing economy.

It doesn't matter which way you look at it - 100% of blame is in the hands of people who are greedy and either too stupid to think of the consequences, or too reckless to care.

It seems that the market is no longer driven by fundamentals, but rather by rumours, reputations, fear and greed, hence a stock market that rapidly grows at times such as the dot com bubble, the growth in sub-prime mortgages and then crashes. When it is growing, everyone from politicians to media, private individuals and corporations jump on the bandwagon hoping to make fast money. Whilst some predicted the bubble would burst there was no action to prevent it from growing. Why should we, people were making money and if there was a correction this would be a natural process. Yet when a crash does happen the market looks to be bailed out rather than accept its failures and allow for natural correction.
If we advocate a free market surely this correction should be allowed to occur naturally? But that would destroy jobs, business etc. So what we are saying is that we want a free market when everything is going well, but when things go wrong and it looks like the profits will disappear we want governments to bail out the system. That doesn't seem like a free market and looks like people wanting to have their cake and eat it. What system are we really trying to run, are we really looking for a free market or are we really just protectionists who want a safety net?

I'd be interested in people's thoughts
Julian

Will Hutton - The man who has increasingly looked like a sweaty, frightened rabbit on many a news programme?

Does his wife still have an interest in the property company First Premise Limited?

Well, I hope it is more diverse and less one-sided than Ö÷²¥´óÐã radio 4 managed on Saturday with The Bottom Line. Evan Davies had a panel of four `distinguished' guests discussing psychology and the present economic situation. All of them assumed the way the brain works are common to men and women. Not so. More than one commentator has recently wondered aloud if we would have got into this present crisis if there had been less testosterone swishing about in the various exchange markets. Certainly in the City. So please let's have some gender equality and recognition, at least in the discussion, of the possible effects of a totally male-based, testosterone driven aggressive climate and how things might be done differently in the future. Folorn hope, I know. We never seem to learn our lessons. It could be done so differently. But will it? Give or take a few years and we'll be back to the same old, catastrophic old ways.

First of all, the priority at the moment must be to rebuild confidence in financial markets. Allocating recent blame would not help this, though it is important that we learn the necessary lessons as soon as possible.

Fortunately, though, the main blame can be seen to arise from three decades ago. Of its two main proponents, one is so far into Alzheimers as to be beyond any communication, and the other is dead; also from Alzheimers – a suitable fate for those who bequested us such madness. But the problem started even earlier. Up to the 1970s Keynesianism had successfully ruled macroeconomics for nearly half a century. In the 1970s, however, it was subverted by the Philips curve; which purported to show a link between inflation and unemployment. This, though, had no direct link with Keynesianism; but, being a simple theory, it was embraced by Keynesians – and became identified with them. Unfortunately, in the 1970s the theory was fatally undermined by the onset of stagflation.

The Chicago School used this breakdown of theory to falsely destroy the position of Keynesianism; leading to Galbraith’s comment that Milton Friedman received his Nobel Prize for the false criticism of someone else’s work!
However, the Chicago School – then promoting monetarism – gained considerable credence with the conservative politicians who wanted to move the debate to the right.

This brings us to the two real villains, though paradoxically they have since become the most popular leaders of their respective nations, Thatcher and Reagan. Margaret Thatcher started her right-wing revolution in 1979 and Ronald Reagan followed her lead from 1971. Both espoused The Chicago School philosophies of non-intervention by government (deregulation, which ultimately led to the nonsense of derivatives) and laissez-faire; for which we are now paying the price. Both also switched their focus from investing in the longer term to spending in the shorter term; and fired up the credit boom. Thatcher, for example, used the riches of the North Sea, and privatisation, to give her electorate the feeling that life was sweeter than it really was. MacMillan was right when he accused her of selling off the family silver. Reagan simply gave billions away to the rich with his tax breaks, at the same time as spending a fortune on star wars.

So it was that the two most popular leaders set in place the factors which have led to our current crisis. But the reason it has taken so long to become the disaster we now see was because one person, Alan Greenspan the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, bought off the coming Armageddon with interest rates cuts which rescued the US from Black Monday in 1987 and the dot.com crash in 2000. This saw interest rates as low as 1% from 2000 onwards; effectively giving free credit – which led to the credit driven philosophies (and especially the private equity boom) since. He can, thus, be seen as equally responsible for where we now are; especially where his successors have followed his strategy.

In the UK Gordon Brown’s culpability was limited to not questioning economic Thatcherism. Where so many of us were questioning the more ridiculous aspects of credit policy, he chose to allow it full rein; presumably where its something for nothing philosophy allowed individuals to nicely live beyond their means and, feeling good, to continue to vote New Labour.

The main lesson to learn is that ‘if it seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t!’ Common-sense would be a good start; though some aspects of Keynesianism could be profitably revisited.

Isn't it time we stopped using the word 'Blame'? OK - examine the mess we're in to avoid repeating it, but stop wasting time and energy looking for scapegoats and start spending it purely on finding a solution.

I also wish the media (including Ö÷²¥´óÐã) would stop talking/reporting us into a landslide recession. We all have got the message that things are bad - constant repetition simply makes the waverers pull out of all banks and investments and drives banks and investments further into the red. Please start 'talking up' -
BE POSITIVE!!!

I respect Will Hutton but in the Observer he seemed to be presuming that the lessons of this debacle would be learned.

I am a tad more of a sceptic and think that without a really thorough public inquiry - independent, with teeth and with the use of pliers - we will always have spin and distorted history.

I look forward to the programme but hope that your interviewees will also be pushing for an impartial and deep public investigation into what went wrong.

How can we learn the lessons if we don't really know what really happened.

For example when did the governement know there were problems and what did they do?

I appreciate some of this may be company confidential but then we have had to buy them out so ... tough!

I would argue that you are missing 'The Consumer'.

There is too much 'keeping up with the Jones's' in today's society, with too much value placed on material possessions.

People should re-align their thinking; there is more to life than a big home, a shiny car and the latest games console. For example, family, friends and health.

It has been interesting to see that the entire blame and attention has been on the banks. What nobody has talked about is that bad debt is a response to demand for loans driven largely by our goverments. Labour goverment has been hugely irresponsible in driving what has been a craze for propoerty ownership. They drove this pressure that eveyone should own a property, increasing demand and so prices. It reflect the fact that british economy is driven to a large degree by properties as do not make anything anymore. I would like to see Gordon Brown taking accountability for their art in creating the problem. What is wrong with long term renting - why dont we increase the housing assiciation long term renting proposition? Nobody too is talking about regulators - UK made it too easy to get a loan and there has been no review of the screening process in the light of property prices getting completely out of sync with salaries. Screening processes are much tighter in other countries.

ll

The blame for this financial crisis surely has to lay primarily at the door of the free market capitalists, beginning with Thatcher, who were prepared to 'let the market decide', and to hell with the consequences.

As a result we have had many years of greed with banks falling over themselves to lend us money, with no thought as to where it might end or what would happen when it became clear that many people simply could not afford to pay back what they owed.

It frankly amazes me how two faced some of the right wing press have been, one breath blaming Labour for introducing a 'nanny state' whist at the same time criticising them for not intervening enough and regulating the banks more - the seem to want to have their cake and eat it!

Yes the Government should have taken action many years ago to re-introduce some of the regulations cast aside by Thatcher in the early 1980's, but had they done so I can only imagine the wining that would have ensued from the likes of the Daily Telegraph and Mail.

I bet Gordon Brown hopes it won't be his Special Advisor
Sir Alan Greenspan who will
be sent by viewers to the
stocks ..... wasn't he the
guy Brown hailed in Fife
as 'the greatest living
economist' (sic) since
Adam Smith?

With the Glenrothes by-election going on in his backyard Labour
is trying to pin blame on tiger
economies such as Iceland &
Ireland in order to smear by
association the SNP - hence
I suspect the declaration of
economic war on Iceland by
Brown last week ..... a silly
move, in my view, as they
promptly received financial
help from Russia - as well
from more solid allies in
Scandinavia like Norway
and Sweden - who along
with Canada and the tiny
independent Luxembourg
have illustrated that there
is no correlation between
small size and political independence and risks
in the current financial
crisis, have they not?

I also hope the panel
will acquit 'economists'
- as a profession most
of us have been those
issuing the clearest of
warnings about asset
mispricing over the
last few years - with
a few exceptions ....

No the real villains
are not economists
but accountants and
politicians ............!

Banks are to blame but lack of regulation played a major role and that was because the regulation was weak on the insistance of G Brown.

I worked for Westminster Bank (later Natwest) in the '60s. Each night we had to balance and our liquid assets had to be at least 13.5% of our total net income plus deposits. 11% was kept as cash and 2.5% deposited with the Bank of England. These were BofE rules to ensure we had enough liquidity to stop a 'run' on the bank and to ensure money supply was controlled. So with every £100 deposited £86.50 could be lent, the rest kept as a liquid assett. This worked well for years.

In 1997 the regulatory role of the Bank of England was taken away by Brown. As a sop, it was given the role of setting the interest rate. But it was only the interest rate role that was publicised.

I understand that each year (roughly) the regulators allowed a lower and lower amount of the deposits to be kept liquid. In fact many of the banks loaned an awful lot more than was covered by deposits, HBOS by 177%!

Interesting that the only UK bank in public ownership not asking for help is HSBC which has a deposit to loan book value of 90%, pretty well the old Bank of England safety rate.

[Banks make money by lending money (over and over again in the same year) and because there are so few major banks the money gets paid straight back into one of the big high Street banks. That money can be lent again. If you only lend the BofE 86.5% then over a few transactions the amount available to lend dwindles away. But if you can lend 100% then that money just goes round and round and it can be lent out tens of times during the year. Each lend nets the banks a hearty slice of interest. The badly regulated, or non regulation as it became was a licence for the Banks to print money. But they didn't make provision for a 'run' on the bank and have left us with this dreadful problem.

Gordon Brown is to blame. Thatcher set the seeds to grow.

Apparently Paul Krugman has just won the Nobel Prize? !!!!

His 'Age of Diminished Expectations' was one
of the best critiques of
the Savings & Loans
bailout by Reagan in
the 1980's.

1) Thatcher- Policies of building society demutualisation, and general financial deregulation which has been continued ever since.

2) American presidents for the last 50 years or so.

3) Whoever or whatever created human beings (or some, at least) to have such a high propensity for greed.

MISSING BALANCE.

The Money Mess is just one more illustration that unconstrained individuals rise, inexorably, to positions of power. This happens in the animal world - and we are animals.

Having a complex overlay of human thinking and functionality, we can persuade ourselves, and others, that this is called 'civilisation'; wonderfully human.

In truth, any semblance of civilisation was lost when the world 'went male' in its underlying ethos; eschewing the Female Principle while intensifying dog-eat-dog and Man-consume-Planet.

Let no one be fooled by the rise of Woman Power; ('equality' and the like). Activist Woman has eschewed the 'clean power' that Mother Nature suffused her with, and bought-in to unsustainable, grubby, male judgement of value and of worthwhile goals.

Thus male excess now has the same 'sign' as female excess; there is no balance. Excess will proliferate, and intensify, in ALL aspects of life.

We need a heroine.

All of you blaming Thatcher for the deregulation introduced whilst in power are overlooking something.

In 1997, when changing the powers of the Bank of England and introducing the FSA did Gordon Brown tighten regulation, leave it the same, or deregulate further? Answer he deregulated further and left us with a system where everybody thought everyone else was meant to be in charge, so no-one did anything to prevent this current crisis.

"No boom and bust"
"No housing price bubbles"

!

Its the fault of a lot of different groups/organisiations.

However the media really don't help. The Ö÷²¥´óÐã website headline today reads 'BANK SHARES FALL DESPITE BAILOUT'.

You have to look a long way through the website to read the really good news of today - 'FTSE UP 8.26%'. Confidence overall has grown today beacuse of these huge measures! This is a piece of good news, why not report it instead of trying to sabotage it with negative headlines.

If you want people to be able to have a meausured view on these things and maybe get out of this hole by building confidnce please report both the good and the bad in big letters and not just go for ratings by using sensationalist bad news headlines!

Note it is just the Ö÷²¥´óÐã headline I have read -I'm sure everyone else reports it in an equally biased way.

Grawth No. 19

Thatcher started the deregulation, and it has continued ever since. But the biggest bonfire of regulation in recent history was under Thatcher. When New Labour came to power, they may have deregulated further, but there wasn't an awful lot of regulation left to scrap!

Post 15 is political dynamite is
it not? Condemnation of Brown/
Balls from right inside that bank!

Andrew Rawnsley's book on New
Labour tried to tell the inside story about Brown's fight with
Eddie George over this; though
George did make a speech a few
months back suggesting that the
FSA was not entirely to blame.

I was not convinced by that - not least after reading Mr Rawnsley!

This is Newsnight - ergo it is all the Tories fault - see if you can save your precious Gordon Brown and the Labour party. When Newsnight is truely balanced and start attacking this government like it did the Tories in 1992-97 I will start watching again

Shame too that UK regulators did
not heed this warning from Ö÷²¥´óÐã
Scotland's Sally Magnusson back in 2006 when she tried to door-step 'Fred The Shred' as part of
her Panorama investigation into
'The Money Trap' (2/7/2006) ....

NB Sally Magnusson is a Scottish Icelander.

"So who do you think is to blame? You can share your thoughts with us on the website and cast your vote after the programme."

Is blogdog confined to the kennel then?

Are you asking who the Masters of The Universe are once again. Haven't we already been there?

This can only be answered probabilistically.

What a ridiculous concept - "a trial" as if it's some kind of Miss Marples open and shut case.

If anyone wants to cast blame look around. I bet 90% of the people reading this have splurged on credit at some point. Or took a loan out for something they DIDNT really need. Used to a credit card to pay for a holiday they "deserved".

We live in a market economy. Economy's are cyclical and always have been going back to pre Christian times. Recessions and crisis are as cyclical as "booms" you CANNOT have one without the other. Many of the same people who are boo-hooing about the current crisis benefited from the boom times. Deal with it and accept personal responsibility - the need to blame someone else is extremely misguided and self indulgent.

While we are on the subject I wish the Ö÷²¥´óÐã would stop filming vox pox's and asking people with no idea of what is going on what their view is. You may as well ask a monkey what his view on climate change is - neither the monkey nor the man on the street the Ö÷²¥´óÐã insist on representing have any idea what the issues are. Our tax is being INVESTED in banks capital not "spent" there is a difference. The same money that would have been used on fighting ridiculous wars - its not like its actually going to effect our livelihoods. UK PLC will just owe a bit more money for a few years - so what. We'll get a windfall back in 5 - I guarentee this investment will turn a profit. It's the same investment deal Buffet has made on Goldman Sachs. Trust me he knows what he is doing.

Fundamentally the Government is to blame for encouraging the BoE to reduce rates in 2003 to stimulate lending for purchases. Eddie George revealed this was the case just over a year ago.

Having said that, banks then leant irresponsibly, dreaming up new products on a day by day basis, and justifying them by claiming that they were only meeting consumer demand.

To top this off, the Great British Consumer took advantage of the lax credit rules and borrowed and spent to the hilt.

We now have an economic policy based on bailing out all the above, while the genuine prudent are left to fend for themselves.

FREEDOM

Grawth (#19) 'he who pays the piper....' but all that went very quiet.... didn't it?

A system maintained by the rich and powerful is to blame. Yet I wager all the money in my bank account, (hah!) that not once will you talk about ideas regarding the system itself, but instead confine the discussion to problems INSIDE the system.

Chevgr blamed the people spending beyond their means.......which is ok, until you realise that without that extended spending the economy would have gone into recession a good few years ago.

Besides, you shouldn't lend money unless you're prepared to accept the fact that you might not get it back.......

NickThornsby wrote: "3) Whoever or whatever created human beings (or some, at least) to have such a high propensity for greed."

The problem is that we have a system run by rich and powerful people that has greed as its foundation.

Instead of rewarding co-operation and sharing, instead of encouraging people to be ultruistic, we do the reverse. This system creates alienation, mistrust and every negative association that comes along with it.

That is not to say greed isn't going to exist if we simply change the system. It will do as sure as random acts of generosity by good people exist in a system that overwhelmingly enourages the opposite.

Yet if this whole sorry charade has shown one thing is that the very thing that makes capitalism so powerful is also the same thing that makes it so transparent. At times like this the mask slips and the system and its supporters are seen for what they are.

People ought not to forget this glimpse behind the sequined curtain of capitalism when "stability returns", for all that glitters is surely NOT gold........

The discussion is somewhat beyond the point and the pannelist do not understand the undrlying reasons. The financial instruments are trivial to understand to any competent mathematician. Basically what happened was that the industry built a huge pyramid scheme with these instruments. There was too much liability instruments as compared to cash available. It is basically the same what happened in Albania in 1996 - 97 and what actaully is happening in Zimbabwe. Creating pyramid scheme is dishonest (and illegal). This indeed shows that the bankers were dishomest. (Not surprise there.) But pyrmaid schemes grow with exponential complexity (i.e. very fast). The bankers were cretins not to realise that it would catch up with them (and the rest of us soon). Basically the industry, as it is, is run by dishonest cretins. They turn the Western economies to huge Zimbabwe.

It is sad that pannelist of Newsnight do not see the obvious.

I do take exception to this 'trial'. I normally have great regard for the Newsnight Team, and for Will Hutton for his knowledge and insight - though tonight is an exception. This banging on about bonuses ( of which I am not a recipient) is really not the point surely: we do (did?) live in a capitalist society and as such what is earnt from the markets is fair play. I fully appreciate that almost everthing has now changed but is this not a case of the Emperor's New Clothes?

In brief and not to exercise the comments made already. One further point has to be not whether this government caused the problem but whether it has left us in a position to weather the storm well.

It has to be said that the PM allowed the hosing bubble to continue far too long and for debt to build to staggering levels. He rode the wave and should take some of the blame when the it crashes to shore.

I am sorry but comparing the City to casino is silly, shows lack of knowledge how the City and casino work and insult to casino business model. If you play in casino you have to buy tokens for CASH. The City works like a casino were punters can get tokens on credit promising a payback (with interest) when they win with these tokens. It does not take a rocket scientist (only a mildly competent mathematician) to realise that if casinos were run that way they would have gone bust. So did the City

The cd's and sub prime markets remind me of the great pyramid selling scandal of 35 years ago.

The cds and sub prime markets remind me of the great pyramid selling spree of 35 years ago.

Summarising my earlier comments: the current crisis show a very poor moral quality (dishonesty) and intelectual capacity (they cannot comprehend the most basic issues of complexity) of people running the financial system. It is frightening but I call them dishonest cretins and in my view it is an understatement.

Where were the accountants who sanctioned the audits of all these troubled banks? Aren't they also to blame?

This is week 2 without Jeremy. How come Jon Sopel is doing Newsnight tomorrow? Where is Jeremy?

Its clear that the root cause of the credit bubble and crunch was the lack of appropriate regulation in the lending of money to those that could not afford to pay back.
The additional money available by practically unrestricted credit and the rising prices that this caused in housing particularly made everyone think they were well off and the system seemed to be a way for ordinary people to get rich quick.
All of this fed into increased consumption of goods and the spread of the bubble to the manufacturing economies of the far east and the further increase of all values of commodities and rises in equities to reflect this.
THe British and american governments were only too pleased to believe this would continue with the wave of increased tax take on the income, consumption and property value hike via construction and stamp duty taxation.
The truth is that as with other recessions poor people suffer the most with unemployment and restrictions on social spending that the reduced tax take produces.
The simple prevention of this crisis would have been achieved by better regulation of mortgages and credit card debt by paying more attention to ability to pay rather than profit available to banks.
Politically the down side of this risk is too great to leave it to the banks to determine and regulate. As we have seen it soon becomes a political problem. By now undoubtedly the smart money is out of the system and will not be put back in until values have hit rock bottom.
The western capitalist system has taken a serious knock and it is now time for less naturally resourced economies to take of stock as to what they are really worth.

Myson posing 23, The Tories were never mentioned. I will. (see below)
GANGOPHONE POSTING 9. I alwyas knew we had one thing we agree about. Will Hutton.

He has been constantly right over the City and my party's love affair with it, locked in by the previous Government. Nobody questioned what it was doing and from where all this so-called "wealth" came.

As I have written before my MP told me 80% of the wealth came from it and he never asked why and how.

We are all to blame because we all jumped on the live now pay later band-wagon, reaping where we had not sown as I once blogged.

TRANSPARENCY BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT

How revealing to watch (closely) the un-ruffled Geoffrey Robinson's performance. I observed several ploys for survival under questioning that might illuminate 'matters of wealth'. He probably said (without saying) more about this situation under scrutiny, than all the others put together.

TOPSY-TURVY THEATRICS AND

We heard one of the panellists (Irwin Stelzer, I recall) at pains to point out that what happened wasn't driven by a group of venal people driven by self-interest. No, they were acting quite 'legally'. Similarly, most of the 'defendants' either passed the buck or described what they did in terms which all but exonerated their industry.

The sad point here is that we live in times where many take it as given that if the law does not specifically proscribe certain actions, those actions are legal. So technically, Stelzer is quite correct, except that he fudges legality with morality. Most of what's done in parliament is legislation, but it's done in English language and so is open to interpretation. English language itself is not truth functional, the definitions of terms is highly problematic. Hence loopholes.

Light touch regulation effectively left the bank executives to regulate their own industry, i.e. the foxes were trusted to guard the hen-houses.

Just to make it clear that the government colluded with these predatory practices (and if it was happening with Credit Cards it was inevitable that it would be happening elsewhere), back in 2003 the Treasury Committee published their report on and I remember watching the CEOs of some of the key banks (Mr Matthew Barrett, Chief Executive Officer, Barclays Bank, Mr Gary Hoffman, Chief Executive, Barclaycard, Mr James Crosby, Chief Executive, HBOS (Halifax Bank of Scotland), Mr Eric Daniels, Chief Executive, Lloyds TSB, Mr Fred Goodwin, Chief Executive, The Royal Bank of Scotland, and General Charles Krulak, Chief Executive Officer, MBNA Europe) being warned by the Committee (see .

The First Report and later government response can be found .

120 bn pounds was spent on credit cards and store cards in the UK in 2002. It was obvious what was going on, so why didn't more journalists run with it? The answer is that our entire culture is riddled with predatory deceit and self-interest, i.e. venality, most of which is legal. This didn't begin under New Labour, but they certainly didn't make matters more transparent, except in a very cynical sense that they further deregulated. In whose interests?

Perhaps the urbane Irwin Stelzer needs to look up the word venality and give what he said a little further thought? The assumption that one is free to do whatever one wants is narcissistic entitlement, an infantile/adolescent anarchism and it's becoming ever more endemic if not pandemic by political design under the mantra that market-forces determine value. Such an appeal to 'market forces' is abrogation of government (elsewhere it's abrogation of parenhood), it's a belief in mysticism. Venal ppeople make money out of others this way.

MONTY SLATER

For anyone .

OPACITY: NOT MAKING THE CONNECTIONS

After reading some of the 2003 Treasury Committee oral evidence above, think about the USA's ETS trends and our own here (Leitch Report and PISA data). Then think about what drives differential fertility/birth-rates and how it's being exacerbated by high levels of low-skilled immigration - and why we have high levels of low-skilled immigration (the points system won't work, as abilities are largely genetic).

Do you think foxes can be trusted to police hen-houses and if regulated (rather than imprisoned for usury/exploitation/deception/fraud) won't they just find other ways of legally endebting low literacy/low-numeracy consumers whilst telling everyone that it's patronising to doubt such people's ability to make decisions for themselves? After all, everyone's equal, they can read the APR information they're sent, and we are heavily investing in literacy and numeracy skills aren't we (except all the Parliamentary reports say it doesn't work).

People can be educated................can't they???

Most people would be shocked if they knew.

... There's a surprise....these are the most useful post-puberty IQ proxies for Verbal, Spatial and Non-verbal IQ that the country had, so I guess they had to go as the trend data just reveals too much which is at odds with New Labour's environmentalist Lysenkoist ideology.