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The Economy

I do accept that, but I want to go on to quote the Governor of the Bank of England, whom the right hon. Gentleman is so fond of quoting, who so pithily expressed it by saying that""banks are global in life and national in death."" That is precisely the opposite argument to the one that the Conservative party has been making. In other words, of course, Britain was exposed to the global economic downturn because it had a large financial sector. It had lots of global banks based in London. Those banks were indeed global; they operated across the world. When it came to saving those banks, it was the responsibility of the British Government, as of course it should be. We need only to think of the Icelandic banking crisis, which affected individuals and local authorities across the UK, or the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which reverberated across global boundaries, to realise that that is true.