Peter Hoskin

Getting down to business

The problem with speeches on matters fiscal is that they can often be quite dull – full of dreary statistics and technical lingo. The oratory efforts of Brown and Darling are full testament to that. But today – in his speech to business figures – David Cameron makes a good fist of it. It’s fairly engaging stuff.

 

It helps, of course, that he talks a lot of sense, even if it’s still in quite general terms. Here, for instance, is what he had to say on responding to the banking crisis: 

“We need to avoid a rush to judgement and an instant rewriting of all the regulatory rules. Indeed, the worst response to the current crisis would be a knee-jerk response and proscriptive over-regulation. The UK has a long history of benefiting from over-regulation elsewhere from the emergence of the Eurodollar market in the 1960s thanks to US tax policy to the effects of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation in recent years.” 

And he lands some effective punches on Brown and his borrowing binge: 

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