@ AMERO

"This...is a first step towards the transference of monetary and fiscal control...away from sovereign nations to centralised control (undemocratic) within the EU and IMF."

Is it the first step? Hasn't it been going on for decades? It's only today that it's erupted in the public eye. Centralised control, meaning big banks, world-wide, privately owned by very unscrupulous people. It's the worst scenario. Like you say, undemocratic, and more like creeping totalitarianism, like rule in China. It's time people woke up to the fact that our freedoms are eroding away by the day.

We'll soon be told when we can eat, go to the toilet, when we can talk and what we can say. DON'T PEOPLE GET IT? Is it too big a leap for y'all? We're being taken over by raging lunatic dictators! The owners of the Western world banking system control our LEADERS, whether it's Conservative or Labour - who're all puppets, being told what to do and say - they're expendable - Blair or Brown or Cameron or Milliband, it's all the same to THEM. It'll be our turn next, and we're very expendable in THEIR eyes. WAKE UP, FOLKS! Look up who owns the big banks, who really controls the IMF. In fact, look up George Green on YouTube, he'll put you in the picture without wrapping it up in cotton wool. Be prepared for Armageddon.

Put the Quakers back in charge of Barclays, which they founded, as they also founded Lloyds. In what I wish that I could turn into something witty or profound, all four of the Cadbury, Rowntree, Terry and Fry families were, and presumably still are, Quaker. Banks once against run on the principles of Simplicity, Truthfulness, Equality and Peace are exactly what we need. Likewise, confectioners, among so very many other concerns. But most pressingly, banks.

All retail banks should be transformed into mutual building societies, ironclad as such by the Statute Law that already forbids building societies from engaging in investment banking, and would therefore automatically forbid all retail banks from so engaging if they had all been so transformed. I do occasionally receive communications from people who cannot get their heads around that one. But it is the law; look it up if you don’t believe me. And those people’s complete inability to deal with the very concept of mutualism is an even stronger argument in its favour.

The roots of the American Republic, of the campaign against the slave trade, of Radical and Tory action against social evils, of the extension of the franchise, of the creation of the Labour Movement, and of opposition to the Boer and First World Wars, are all in Catholic, High Church (and thus first Methodist and then also Anglo-Catholic, as well as Scottish Episcopalian), Congregationalist, Baptist, Quaker and other disaffection with the Whig Revolution of 1688, such that within those communities, long after any hope of a Stuart restoration had died, there remained a sense that the Hanoverian State, its Empire, and that Empire’s capitalist ideology were less than fully legitimate, a sense which had startlingly far-reaching consequences. Radical action for social justice and for peace derived from testing the State and its policies against theologically grounded criteria of legitimacy. It still does.

In reclaiming, reconstructing and redeploying that tradition, each of those communal bearers of it has a part to play. In the Quaker case, it is the Four Testimonies, set within the present relocation within the Great Tradition, both of the Puritan and Anabaptist movements behind the rise of the Friends, and of the Radical Dissent to which they contributed so significantly and substantially.

In large part, that will involve the correction and redirection of Quakerism, especially as it has usually manifested it since the middle half of the twentieth century. However, it will also involve other correction and other redirection: correction by, and redirection towards, the Simplicity, Truthfulness, Equality and Peace to which Scripture and Tradition bear witness, making them fundamental to all three of the authentic, indigenous, popular political traditions of this country.

It could turnout that Bob Diamond is innocent !

Now please can Ed Balls fall on his sword? Nope don't expect the ex-city minister to accept responsibility like a man. Hang your head in shame, it happened on your watch!

Put the Quakers back in charge.

Bob Diamond resigns from Barclays over Libor scandal - live
3 July 2012 10:11AM

In one word, the bank and top management of Barclays stink. It all boils down to nothing but greed to make more money for themselves and the shareholders. How come the UK authorities are still sleeping. If one can recall, a few years ago at the time of financial crisis hitting large UK banks, only Barclays did not want any Government support/bailout (unlike RBS) as if they had taken the Government support then, this scandal (LIBOR fixation) would have broken out long ago and taxpayers would have saved some money then. Unfortunately all was wrapped so well. Weather it is their African operation, Dubai operations, etc, the top management go on making big monies by such methods only.

Miliband was a minister in the government that gave creeps like Diamond free rein. The whole shower of them should resign.

Am I missing something. Surely he should've been sacked???

Perhaps time for Baroness Shriti Vadera to come forward and tell us about the coversations she had with City bankers during Gordon's time in office?