Hi John,
Yesterday’s autumn statement may have aimed to undo the damage of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget in September, but it also left one key measure of Trussonomics still standing.
The Financial Services and Markets Bill, as we’ve been warning, will unleash a new wave of financial deregulation which threatens to sow the seeds of the next financial crisis - and risks driving up the price of food and energy even further.
Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt are sticking with this key plank of Trussonomics. As well as announcing a new era of austerity, they’re ploughing ahead with Truss's plans to scrap many of the rules introduced after the 2008 financial crisis. Can you join the more than 20,000 of us standing against it?
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In an extraordinary section of his speech yesterday, Jeremy Hunt lauded Margaret Thatcher’s 1986 deregulation of the City of London, known as the ‘Big Bang’. These policies unshackled the financial sector, bringing the ‘greed is good’, yuppie culture of speculative banking to London. As unemployment topped 3 million, the financiers made a killing. Many still blame the Big Bang for the reckless behaviour which fuelled the economic crash of 2008.
Globally, as the City’s power grew, so did tax dodging schemes, speculation and a mountain of debt which saw wealth plundered from the majority of the world and channelled into the bank accounts of the super-rich. Here, the Big Bang helped cement the power of financial interests, which have shaped our country ever since.
The Big Bang is not something that should be celebrated by the chancellor today, least of all in a cost of living crisis. Behind Hunt’s words are some even more worrying actions. When it comes to financial deregulation, the government remains committed to the disastrous experiment with ‘Trussonomics’.
The Financial Services and Markets Bill is at the heart of this experiment – a speculator’s charter which will hand more power to the financial markets to dictate the prices of basic necessities like food and energy.
It’s clear that speculators are already playing an actively unhelpful role in the cost of living crisis. In the US, a former regulator of these commodity markets suggested that oil and gas prices could tumble by as much as 25% if politicians gave just a signal that they were about to regulate these markets.
But Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak are sending exactly the opposite message. Far from better regulation, they are proposing to slash the weak regulation which already exists, as part of a huge programme of deregulation which places the demands of rich shareholders ahead of a more stable and equal financial system.
We’ve got to stop them. Already, more than 20,000 of us have sounded the alarm about this terrible bill. Can you sign the urgent petition calling on the government to abandon its plans to hand more power to the speculators now?
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As in the 1980s, those least responsible are being made to pay the highest price to solve a mess they didn’t create. And the consequences won’t just be felt here, but right around the world. We can’t allow it. To give financiers even greater power to gamble on our food and our energy prices is disastrous. Help us defeat this government’s modern Big Bang.
Thank you,
Nick Dearden
Director, Global Justice Now
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