Osborne says he won't bail out bust UK bankers

by Dave Keating | September 29, 2008 at 02:21 am

67 views | 0 Recommendations | 0 comments

The Conservative Party in the UK is havig their party conference today, and as could be expected they are focusing largely on the economy. The shadow chancellor George Osborne has said that the conservatives would not bail out any banks if they were in power. This is obviously a popular vote-getting thing to say, but of course it's also quite easy to say for the conservatives as they wouldn't be able to come to power until Gordon Brown calls an election, and he doesn't have to do that until 2010 at the latest.

Shadow Chancellor George Osborne will tell bankers on Monday they will have to pay their share of any financial bailouts under a future Conservative government.

"I will not tax the family earning 20,000 pounds to carry on paying the bonuses of the banker earning 2 million pounds," he is due to tell the Conservative conference in Birmingham.

His speech comes shortly after the government announced it was nationalising mortgage bank Bradford and Bingley, the latest victim of the global credit crunch.

Osborne has been a consistent critic of the government's rescue of Northern Rock in February, saying the taxpayer was paying too high a price for the errors of financiers.

In a message designed to assure voters that the Conservatives would not be soft on the City, Osborne will say that bankers who take risks must also bear the cost.

"If you pay yourself sums far beyond what anyone else in any other walk of life does, then be prepared to lose it when you make mistakes," he said in extracts of his speech released in advance.