Is this the closest that Brown’s government has come to a <em>mea culpa</em>?

A striking passage from Peter Mandelson’s speech at Mansion House last night:

“Starting in the 1980s we allowed the diversity of the British economy – or lack of it – to approach the limits of what was prudent. Sometimes there was an economic fatalism about manufacturing decline and falling British goods exports, rather than seeing them as something that policy and private enterprise should address.

Our economy, and certainly our corporate tax base, became too dependent on the City. We were also carrying a huge hidden insurance liability for a sector that was taking badly understood and inadequately policed risks.” Yes, I know Mandelson takes things back to the 1980s – but he still seems to suggest that many of the problems with our economy were at least incubated during the New Labour years.  You wonder what Gordon “tri-partite” Brown will make of his claim that the financial sector was “inadequately policed”.