Storing up more trouble
Sir: Your leading article (20 September) calls for a ‘kick up the backside’ to the banking industry. That kick should be aimed elsewhere. The British and American governments have not merely permitted this crisis to happen, but positively created it by a deliberate relaxation of monetary controls. Worse still, they have now decided that instead of destroying excess credit by asset deflation, bankruptcies and share collapses, the monetary inflation is to be consolidated by absorption of bad debt into the public finances.
I don’t see how this can end well. Some commentators are already saying that, if passed unaltered, the proposed American financial legislation could, once properly understood, trigger a major crash in US financial shares, possibly before this letter is published.
I think The Spectator and its economically savvy readers should put on fresh pairs of winkle-pickers, and gather in Whitehall and Washington for some kicking practice.
Rolf Norfolk
Birmingham
Impeach Brown
Sir: If the problem with removing Brown is that Labour’s front bench don’t want the responsibility (Politics, 20 September), and if the scale of Brown’s financial duplicity is as great as you say it is in your article (‘The great debt deceit’, 20 September), surely a parliamentary motion to have Brown impeached would find overwhelming support on both sides. As with Richard Nixon, it doesn’t actually have to take place to have the desired effect, and above all it will allow free and full discussion of why we are in this mess, and the scale of the clean-up necessary.
Richard Roberts
Littleport, Cambridgeshire
Kremlin methods
Sir: Tom Parfitt’s article (‘Moscow’s secret war in Ingushetia’, 13 September) is a grim yet wholly accurate description of the techniques used by the Russian leadership to terrorise its own citizens. The sad truth is that Mr Parfitt could have simply substituted the word ‘Ingushetia’ for — among others — ‘Chechnya’ in the title of his piece without sacrificing any accuracy.
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