The chancellor’s proposed Edinburgh Reforms to financial regulation suggest that official memories seem to be getting shorter, and dangerously so.
It is not quite 15 years since the British government was forced, in effect, to nationalise most of the country’s biggest banks, after the global financial crisis left them teetering on the edge of collapse – something that would have plunged the economy into the deepest slump since the great depression.
In his memoirs, then chancellor Alistair Darling recalls being told in October 2008 that people were only two hours away from being unable to withdraw money from British banks. Now, the current chancellor, Mr Hunt, is behaving as though that never happened. It is a case of Brexit-induced amnesia.
