Banks get £46bn hand-out

Trillion-pound bail-out not enough?

Sept 8, 2011 – This story didn’t make the front pages. The big banks continue to get massive hand-outs. According to a New Economics Foundation report, the ‘Big Five’ UK banks received £46bn in subsidies in 2010 – equivalent to getting £1,840 from every household in Britain.

This is an ongoing ‘too-big-to-fail’ subsidy, which the banks get on top of the trillion-pound bail-out. The Robin Hood Tax campaign, which helped fund the report, said taxpayer subsidies are sustaining ‘casino-banking’.

“Too big to fail”? “Casino-banking”? In the moral accounting metaphor of many conservatives, banks (and other big businesses) are apparently still seen as deserving – you don’t often see headlines about corporate welfare “SCROUNGERS”. Why deserving? Pre-conceptualised according to the long-entrenched iconography/framing of the heroic, hard-working, self-reliant, successful “wealth creator” (includes newspaper proprietors). Er… self-reliant?

PFI “rip-off”

Aug 27, 2011 – Given last week’s Treasury select committee report (pdf) condemning PFIs, this should’ve been a national headline. According to treasury figures, taxpayers will spend £229 billion on PFI projects that cost contractors only £56 billion.

From today’s Yorkshire Post front page (our bold emphasis):

“MORE than £4bn-worth of huge public works projects are to be signed off by Yorkshire’s local authorities this year using a now-discredited financing system despite condemnation from MPs who say taxpayers are being “ripped off”.

“Treasury figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show the region already owes more than £6bn for schemes funded via the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), a Government-backed way of using private firms to build and run public buildings […]

“Last week a hard-hitting report by the Treasury select committee concluded PFI deals offer “poor value for money” and can typically cost up to 40 per cent more than if they been funded with normal public borrowing. Successive Governments now stand accused of “cooking the books” by using PFI to keep major new infrastructure projects off their balance sheet, so artificially reducing official debt figures – all the time knowing it would ultimately cost taxpayers billions of pounds more.”