A regular look at the world of business, compiled by Insider Dealer.
'I fear that unless the government takes action to ensure that legislation is workabie and enforceable, it will not act as a deterrent to the minority of people who are determined to exploit the system for their own considerable personal gain.' Have I got news for you Alistair, darling. Absolutely everyone involved in the financial sector is out to exBankers' friend: John Smith ploit the system for their own considerable personal gain. That's the bloody point.
Darling continues: "Insider dealing is far more widespread than the government cares to admit. The record shows that the legislation is throughout the world. That is the very nature of the industry.' Precisely! This presumably explains why Britain is a world leader.
Sting leaves Up pops Paul Marland, conservative MP for Gloucestershire West.
This is a man who got ripped off something rotten at Lloyd's insurance market, and who has since taken up cudgels on behalf of his fellow victims.
Marland outlined the infamous 'baby syndicate sting, under which Lloyd's insiders made sure that they pocketed all the sure fire profits business, while the risky stuff was dumped onto the mug punters.
Proles among you will readily draw the analogy to doing the gee-gees. At least you've got an outside chance of winning at the bookies.
Marland quoted Robert Hiscox, deputy chairman of Lloyd's, as arguing: 'If God had not meant them to be sheared, he would not have made them sheep.' He then quoted a member of Lloyd's regulatory body saying: 'If we find a mug, we use him.' up over Facing mass unemployment, rampant employers equipped with savage anti-union laws, and a war on health and welfare services, the working class in Britain faces a real crisis -an avoidable crisis created by the historic failure of its Socialist Outlook exists to fight for a new type of working class leadership, based on the politics of class struggle and revolutionary socialism, to The capitalist class, driven and politically united by its own crisis, its requirement to maximise profits at the expense of the workers, has been given determined, vanguard leadership by a brutal class-war Tory high command.
The Tory strategy has been to shackle the unions with legislation, and to fragment and weaken the resistance of the working class and oppressed, allowing them to pick off isolated sections one at a time, using the Engels, Lenin and Trotsky.
Our socialist alternative is not based on parliamentary elections or illusions of peaceful legisiative change. We fight to mobilise and unleash the power of the working class - the overwhelming majority of society -to topple the corrupt and reactionary rule of capital and establish its own class rule.
We struggle against fragmentation by building solidarity, working to link and unite the various struggles of workers, the unemployed, of women, of pensioners, of the black communities and ethnic minorities, of lesbians and gay men, of students, of youth - and of those fighting imperialism in Ireland and throughout the world. Socialist Outlook is above all an internationalist current, in solidarity with the Trotskyist Fourth International, which organises co-thinkers in 40 countries world-wide.
Unlike some other groupings on the British left, we do not believe a mass revolutionary party can be built simply by proclaiming ourselves to be one. Too often this degenerates into :