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Banking Bill

No, I shall not give way; I want to finish my remarks now. The Prime Minister tends to seek refuge in the notion that the crisis is all the fault of the United States, but the United Kingdom banking system was and is his responsibility. Yesterday, he made an interesting speech to Reuters. Anyone reading it would think that it had been made by some visiting consultant who had been hired a couple of weeks ago to tell us what was wrong with the system. The speech was about all the things that are wrong and all the things that we should do to put them right. Why did he not recognise those things two or three years ago? Why has he not been doing those things? We use the fire analogy a lot. The Prime Minister is like the watchman at the office building. He watches an increasing number of all sorts of people whom he has never seen before—some of them looking pretty dodgy—going in and out. Then he watches people taking petrol in, then somebody who takes matches in and when the building goes up in flames, he expects our gratitude for phoning the fire brigade. The Prime Minister was responsible for the system when it imploded and he expects our gratitude for having cobbled together a solution to it. When the banking element of this crisis is behind us and it emerges as what I believe will be an 18-month to two-year recession, people will remember that this Government presided over the ingredients of that recession.