BUSINESS - DIGBY LORD JONES


Some of us tried hard to get the listening, reading or viewing pub- lic to understand just how important our Financial Sector is to the economic success of our nation: it produces some 12% of the entire tax take of the UK; it pays for our education system; and the defence of the Realm. So let’s stop bashing a banker...and then some idiot would be at it again and the collar of the whole barrel of apples was felt.


That anger hasn’t gone away. It probably never will. The rise of the Corbynistas is a beneficiary, if only in part. The increasing and disturbing rise of today in the polemicism and tribal extremism in western societies can find one of its ingredients of causation in The Crash and the subsequent loss of trust and permanent anger of so many in communities up and down the land.


Add to all that a sudden dose of mass, unsettling immigration and it is little wonder an already insecure and angry populace look at an apparently remote, moneyed and powerful class and say, “Up Yours”!


From Brexit to Trump, from Germany to Sweden, things would never be the same again after 2008.


One could conclude governments successfully fought off the truly existential threat of outright calamity ten years ago, but at what price? Who ended up paying that price?


Who was to blame? The moneymen? For sure. The Regulators? Definitely. But we should not forget in our righteous indignation that the personal greed of each individual played its part; we were all partly to blame of course.


Can it, will it happen again? For sure. That avarice-gene hasn’t left us; I’m not at all sure it’s even gone into hibernation, but please, as we look back over the past ten years and forward to the next ten, remember this:


“If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is!”


Lord Digby Jones of Birmingham KB


Lord Digby Jones is former Director-General of the CBI & UK Trade Minister; a non-aligned, Crossbench Member of the House of Lords & a Businessman (chairing six companies), author & broadcaster. He works closely with Cancer, Military & Educational Charities.


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Fill in all the squares in the grid so that every row, every column and each of the nine squares contain all the numbers 1-9!


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