Darling, the Horse Has Bolted.

Today, on the Politics Show, John McFall, Chair of the Treasury Accounts Committee, got it exactly right.

When discussing the failure of the cut in VAT to instigate economic ‘green shoots’ (oops, there i go again, maybe I should be in the House of Lords), he also pointed out that the monies given to banks to date by the government had been given without any attached strings.

He didn’t seem to think a lot of this, and stressed that the banks should be forced to comply with certain requirement s before a further handout was given.

And so say all of us.

McFall has always impressed me as being one of the more realistic and tougher minded Labour members, who takes the part of the customers and ‘victims’ rather than being intensely relaxed about defending the corporations.

So, when he comes out with this, it is significant.

Not because it is implicitly critical of the rather naive approach of the Chancellor, but because it is an indicator that in the Labour party, someone still has a vestige of the morality and sense of social justice that was that party’s raison d’etre.

Many, many, years ago.

I have to say that this was a pleasant change, as just last week I heard the Prime Minister declaiming that the current annual deficit was £37bn..

Now, this is an interesting figure, because despite all the billions spent in shoring up the banks –

the deficit hasn’t really altered at all.

Strange, you may think, but never fear.

Here we have the prime example of a deus ex machina – an artificial rule applied to allow a specific result to be achieved.

In this case, the uncomfortable truth behind the payment of the debts of UK banks has been disguised by a treasury rule which allows for the non inclusion of extraordinary expenditure (see where I’m going yet?) from the deficit figures.

That is precisely what has been done with regard to the sums given to the banks.

The results of their and Gordon’s incompetence has been granted the use of Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak.

It doesn’t change the facts, however, not least the one that since the depoliticisation of the Bank of England, and the removal of the Banks imperative to regualate the financial services industry, risk taking in banks was positively encouraged.

And now we have the results.

For what it’s worth, the closest parallel to an independent Scotland, namely Norway, has over £380bn in it’s oil fund, and is expected to ride out the recession quite handily, whereas the UK still can’t see the bottom.

Yes, yes, I know our wee Unionist freens will point to a nation of 300,000 people with no oil industry as a rebuttal of that.

For some reason.

Or other.

That’s Iceland you’re talking about.

We are Scotland, and it's a bit different.

But whatever the reason, you can be sure it’s not a comparison offered in the interests of accuracy or reasoned argument.

Question: If you chuck enough cash at a problem, will it go away?

On the answer to this hangs the date of the next election.