This is the man who, in his time as Chancellor, tripled the volume of tax legislation in the UK. So he's a man who likes rules. Micro-manager, budget-inefficient rules. And quite a lot of the tax legislation which he rammed down the throats (just listen to the speed with which he delivers the statistics in his old budget speeches: he does it, quite deliberately, so that it is impossible to actually hear and comprehend what he's saying) of an incomprehending parliament was correcting - or even repealing - other tax legislation which he himself had introduced. So he likes rules, but is absolutely crap at working out which ones will be effective. Unsurprisingly, the UK tax system became notorious in the international business community for being more unstable than that of your average coup-prone, third-world disaster zone - and a number of companies left the UK as a result.
However, while he was imposing thousands of pages of rules on bewildered taxpayers, he clearly didn't bother with what should have been the other side of his remit - financial services regulation. So now we have some catching up to do. Consistent with his record on the tax system - which displayed a huge panache for ineffective, inconvenient changes which completely missed the point which they thought that they were trying to address - rather than trying to stop banks take risks, he's now going to try to stop them stopping silly idiots who want to borrow more than they can afford from taking risks.
This will, of course, do nothing at all to stabilise the global financial markets. All it will do is give people who don't follow rules yet another basis on which to demand that banks pay them money as compensation for misselling - to the detriment of the people who actually repaid their loans, and otherwise generally followed the rules, in the first place. And those same, sensible citizens - who currently have to put up with several cold calls a day inviting them to make claims for missold loans, even if they have been stupid enough to pay off all their loans in accordance with the contractual terms and without suing anyone at all - will also have to tolerate calls asking them if they want to sue for having been sold a mortgage they couldn't afford.
It would still piss me off if this was just going to have the effect of protecting people against their own stupidity: I fully believe in making idiots pay for being idiots. But when you introduce silly, detailed rules, it's actually usually the clever-but-unpleasant people who benefit. I know of a one-time FTSE 100 FD who claimed he had been missold a mortgage product (under current legislation) - despite being an ACA, and having spent the best part of a decade working for one of the large accounting firms - and got a five-figure sum in compensation. He spent it on a built-in home cinema and entertainment system. The proposed changes - as well as preventing self-employed people from getting mortgages and making completely bizarre demands on financial institutions - will only result in the same kind of thing happening again, in 4 or 5 years time, but based on a different set of rules. And Gordon will still claim he couldn't have foreseen it...
(Not Gordon Brown - thinner, brighter, and generally much less severe - but showing a similar degree of grounding in reality...)
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