Vince Cable has been interviewed by Iain Dale for this month's Total Politics magazine.
The full interview is available to read HERE.
I love his refreshing honesty in dealing with a question from Iain which seemed to imply that he was inconsistent. Vince, unlike most politicians, simply says that he was proved wrong by the extreme financial mess we were in and he changed his mind accordingly.
If only a few more politicians could be less entrenched.
Iain Dale : "In September 2008, you said the government must not compromise the independence of the Bank of England by telling it to slash interest rates. A month later, you urged the Chancellor to write to the Governor of the Bank demanding a large cut in interest rates. "
Vince Cable "Yes, that is true and like a lot of other people, I realised in the autumn of 2008 that we were on the verge of a completely catastrophic failure of the system - a once in a lifetime experience. The whole banking system was in danger of going down and this was a system for which the Bank of England had not been prepared. The mandate of the independent Bank of England, which I supported, was not just concerned with those issues, it was concerned with a broadly stable environment. I had supported the independence of the Bank of England and I still do and I think its role will be increasingly important in future years when we get a lot of inflationary pressure. But that moment in September and October when they had to do something dramatic and where their existing mandate was simply about responding to and anticipating inflation rates, this was not actually the primary concern. And I was certainly the first person out of the traps saying that, although it was a departure from the line I had been giving before. "
3 comments:
Will he be asking George Osborne `were you wrong to disagree with the nationalisation of NR`?
The comments left on the Iain Dail website by the rightwing loonies is something to behold. It sometimes feels like reading the Dail Mail or Guido.
** COUGH **
Dale : Do you think in retrospect that it might have been better to let one bank go under? Wouldn't that have made the bankers 'get it'?
Cable : When the Northern Rock crisis broke, my view was that that probably should have been what happened - the government should have rescued the depositors and let the bank go. That was how I responded to it for precisely the reasons you implied.
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