Wednesday 1 October 2008

Non-Partisan Call to Follow the Irish

Following the Irish Government's move yesterday to guarantee all deposits in banks for the next two years, Nick Clegg and Alex Salmond have called on Gordon Brown to go further than his promise to raise the guarantee level to the first £50,000 deposited.

Following on from what was seen as some partisan politics stateside and a failure to recognise the knock on effect to ordinary bank customers of the crisis facing Wall Street is it a sense of reality here in the UK. Gordon has yet to to promise more than the £50k limit but pointed out that the government has yet to let any UK depositor down. That conditional 'yet' is what the calls are for to add further guarantees and stop people with substantial savings having to diversify their accounts across multiple savings accounts. Sadly it appears that Gordon is content with his proposal deeming it to be able to cover "whatever is necessary" to help the British economy.

David Cameron has called for the legislation to further protect savings to be brought forward to next week when the House of Commons reconvenes. However, the Tory leader's emergency statement to his party conference yesterday does not make it clear whether that is merely 'accelerating' the proposed Brown upping the level of guarantee or something more far reaching. Although there may well have been a hint of doing more when he said:

"We are doing everything we can to help you keep your job, your savings, your
pension, your mortgage safe"


It looks like all UK parties are have turned to the same hymn sheet, we'll just wait and see what harmony they settle on to work together.

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