Wednesday 17 April 2013

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM ICELAND?

You'll probably remember Iceland. 

It was the NATO founder member (without nuclear weapons) that Gordon Brown described as terrorists, because his Fundamentally Supine Authority (FSA, now defunct) failed to regulate Icelandic banks in Britain. 

This is the  country of fewer than 400,000 people that Jim Murphy insulted...it was, he said backward-looking. Lord love us. Coming from someone in the London parliament the expression "backward looking" is quite astounding.

Iain Gray liked to rub Alex Salmond's nose in the fact that this little country, part of the "arc of prosperity that the First Minister had suggested that Scotland might join, were it not shackled to the dinosaur of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, had more of less broken itself. 

Well, here's what Iceland did. Instead of pouring billions of its taxpayers money into its banks and allowing its criminally negligent bankers and useless, weak, ineffectual government  to get away with their incompetence, they indicted the Prime Minister and the top bankers, and they helped the PEOPLE. 

Yeah, the people who paid the taxes were helped out. Amazing.

They went through a couple of hard years. No one would deny that. But Iceland is back. Iceland is working and Iceland is growing. No triple dip recessions for backward looking wee Iceland, Jim. The sun is shining on Iceland.

And that's because Iceland used common sense to deal with the financial crisis of 2008. It wasn't scared of its bankers leaving for New York or Mumbai  The top ones wouldn't be working in banking any more, not anywhere in the world. They were in prison in Reykjavik, and one of them in solitary.

Meanwhile in London, they took away one banker's knighthood. Another one who had been criminally negligent, and would have run his bank into the ground, financial crisis or none, offered to have his title taken away, and said that he would be prepared to only take 2/3 of his enormous pension of nearly half a million a year. Lordie, the Brits can be scarily macho.

No one can understand why the top bankers aren't in Wormwood Scrubs, or in the case of Fred the Shred, in Saughton. No one can imagine why, having created £75 billion in quantitative easing (money printing to you and me), no one is any better off...except the banks.

Iceland had all the answers, but they were terrorists, according to Brown, and presumably he never paid any heed to terrorists. It's a pity he didn't take some lessons from them.

What could we learn from Iceland? We could learn how to run the bloody country.  That's what.

17 comments:

  1. WOW! Broon the Loon calling ICELAND terrorists! Does he even know what a terrorist looks like?

    I suppose going on Broon's ideas of what a terrorist looks like ALL the people in Iceland walk around dressed in black wearing black gloves and ski masks!
    Hmm! I think INTELLIGENT people around the world MIGHT pick one or two holes in THAT description!

    So let's look at what we have here. Iceland does NOT go down the QE route but instead JAILS its rogue bankers. Meanwhile back in terrorist free UK we go down the QE route and hey presto the UK is up to its receding hairline in DEBT! Its banks are STILL as corrupt as ever and NORMAL people are struggling to get by day to day! Meanwhile back in ICELAND people are getting on with their lives and THEIR banks are operating NORMALLY!

    Of course this would be THE Iceland that currently sits at number FIFTEEN in the OECD list of countries by GDP per Capita would it?

    I wonder where does the UK sit on this OECD list, well why don't we take a wee sneeky peek and see. Well what do you know the UK, run by Broon and now Cameron sits at......oh surely THIS can NOT be right, UK sits at number SEVENTEEN!

    It gets better. lets look at the SECOND table concerning Exchange Rates shall we?

    Now as we go down this table you would expect, under Broon's law, that Iceland would NOT even register but wait what is THIS. Iceland sits at number FIFTEEN in the table, now where have we seen THAT position before oh that's right GDP per Capita. Well if Iceland, the land of terrorists, is at number fifteen then surely the UK MUST be a lot HIGHER. Well, erm, NO, not exactly! Good old Broon and Cameron have been leading our country in a DOWNWARD spiral. The UK sits at number EIGHTEEN in the currency table. Not bad for a country that is terrorist FREE!

    I'm confused.
    WHO exactly is the Terrorist here?
    It looks like Iceland has managed to deal with its "terrorists" fairly swiftly and with very little commotion. I wonder how the UK is doing with its "terrorists" oh that's right WE are still succumbing to THEIR threats!

    In the meantime Broon the Loon continues to travel the world and tell any idiot prepared to listen, sorry that should of course be any RICH BONKERS BANKER idiot, how he saved the world!

    Meanwhile in London Cameron and his "Darth Vader" of economics a.k.a. George Osborne continue to rape the country of ALL of its assets.

    Is it too late to request sanctuary in Iceland?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_GDP_per_capita

    Just as a wee addendum here but I've just seen the unemployment rates for UK and Scotland. Well what do you know?

    UK employment UP to 2.56 Million rate of 7.9%
    Scot unemployment DOWN to 197,000 rate of 7.3%

    I've also seen the state of the UK and Scots economies over the last THREE months of 2012. Well what do you know?

    Scots Economy GREW by 0.5% Oct - Dec 2012
    UK Economy CONTRACTED by 0.3% Oct - Dec 2012

    Is THIS the reason we're better together?
    Oh it MUST be.the UK NEEDS Scotland to help THEM improve THEIR figures!

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  2. Sorry Tris that post turned into a wee bit of a rant. Oops! :-)

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  3. Brilliant rant, Arbroath... and very interesting figures.

    Thanks for that :)

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  4. Arbroath don't you worry about it, and I couldn't agree more. Speaking of Gidiot I clicked on the link to Poltical Scrapbook and yes he was crying at the funeral. I tend to cry when I see what his policies are doing. Thatcher made me cry too; generally when she was elected again. Never mind crying, I'll be suicidal if it's a No vote in 2014.

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    1. WHIT?
      Was there a funeral today?
      Was it anyone of importance?
      I wasn't aware there was any funeral of significance today!
      Funny I don't remember BBC etc making any sort of announcement about such a funeral.
      I guess it must have just been a last minute "2 for 1" type of funeral deal then.
      Any idea who the undertakers were?
      It wasn't Poundland who were the undertakers was it?
      I only ask because I do seem to remember reading something fairly recently about them moving into the funeral business. :-)

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    2. I saw that photo of him... I was actually going to put up a post with it on, but I'd rather a few people saw this one first, because I think it's important. (And obvioudly I don't really think Gidiot crying is important, just funny).

      I also noticed that someone somewhere photoshopped his face onto her body, on the pics of her "we are leaving Downing Street for the last time" occasion.

      Interestingly in 11 years she was only seen to cry twice. Once when her idiot son got his stupid self lost in Algeria, and the other time when she was "stabbed in the back" by the Tory Party.

      She didn't cry for the miners and factory workers she put on the scrap heap; she didn't cry for the soldiers, sailors and airmen who were killed in the Malvinas/Falklands campaign, she didn't cry for the old people whose pensions she cut.

      Just when something hurt HER. Selfish cow.

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  5. There is something confusing about one cold hearted bastard crying at the funeral of another, I don't get it.

    Its counter-intuitive.

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    Replies
    1. Difficult to get your head round right enough. Why would he be crying? Did she die owning him (personally) some money and The Hon Sir Mark (convicted criminal) told him to get lost (mark being an expert at that).

      Or could it be that Gidiot was in fact crying not because the old woman is dead, but because the IMF slapped him around the face again today?

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  6. Tris

    Off topic but I note that Alex Salmond has said that he attended Thatchers Funeral on behalf of the Scottish people, I wish he had added apart from Bruce Hosie in Dundee who didn't want any part in the most expensive party political broadcast in modern times.

    Bruce

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    1. Thing is Anon he had to attend as First Minister. His attendance is what we ALL would expect from a World class leader. In my view his attendance is NOT because of what she did to Scotland but because we ,the people of Scotland, are BETTER than that. Yes we still hold BIG grudges against her and what she did but on the World stage it is right and proper that our First Minister does attend. If he did NOT attend I would afraid that her funeral would have been turned into a political battle with the BBC and the rest of the media attacking Scotland. We do not want this not do we need this in the run up to the Referendum. A.S.'s attendance today shows that we are BIGGER than creating petty little political squabbles.

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    2. LOL Yeah, Bruce. I suspect that that would go for a very long list of people, and if Eck had read them all out the funeral would be over and done with long before he got finished. Indeed, we'd probably be independent before he'd got to the "Ws".

      Seriously, if you are going to be a statesman, I guess you have to attend these things. It's a hard one to call, but I reckon it was his duty not to show Scotland up. The FM of Wales and Ireland were there too, representing their countries.

      I guess you go and keep your head down, and try not to blub.

      I notice our dear friends in the American administration decided not to bother, and let some old folk from her own era attend instead.

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    3. Bang on Arbroath. I should have said that. :)

      And I wondered whether they had put this funeral thingy out to tender to see if someone would do it a bit cheaper... you know maybe the Chinese, or Vietnamese.

      But it seems that they don't put out to tender, or privatise the things they care about. So it's just the heath service and stuff like that that should be governed by market forces.

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    4. Just thinking about this tendering thingy. Maybe they sold the rights to do the funeral to the North Koreans after all THEY will need every penny they can get their hands on to pay for their "new" nuclear programme!

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    5. I think that, in keeping with the article, we should probably ask the Icelanders what they would do with her? They seem to have infinitely superior ways of dealing with things.

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    6. I wish you had NOT made that suggestion Tris my solitary brain cell is doing over time conjuring up a whole selection of images. :-)

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  7. Oh Arbroath I'm sorry. Don't worry. You leave it to the Icelanders. Think no more of her.

    She's gone...

    Just a thought. I believe Edinburgh laid on a large screen so that people who wanted to watch the funeral on tv could do so... no one turned up.

    I'll add the picture to the next post on Osborne.

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