Mainstream political movements are now embracing financial reform, and are beginning to talk openly about stripping the banks of their power.
The Campaign for an Independent Britain was founded in 1969 with the explicit aim of opposing Britain’s entry to the Common Market; although it failed, it has not given up, and in recent years has widened its goals to include campaigning against all aspects of what it sees as a disastrous and at times lunatic bureaucracy and web of red tape, none more so than the so-called Common Agricultural Policy. The CIB leaflet Starve the World! – a pun on the Band Aid charity song Do They Know It’s Christmas? – explains how the CAP rips off British consumers and poor countries as well as being bad for the environment.
The CIB’s main concern at the moment though is the financial system, in particular the bailout and the arguably even more serious issue of stripping the banks of their power to create credit. The August/September issue of the newspaper Free Britain contains an editorial Why are we bailing out the bankers yet again? and an article by Alistair McConnachie Why the anti-EU movement should embrace Money Reform. The former includes a list of 32 Conservative MPs who rebelled against last month’s vote to give an extra £9.3 billion to the IMF to underwrite these irredeemable debts.
In contrast to a simple “No mas”, Alistair McConnachie’s article contains some positive suggestions as to what should be done:
“Commercial banks to be forbidden from creating money out of nothing. All money to be created by a national institution accountable to us democratically through Parliament”.
“The commercial banks will then compete with themselves to attract that money into their savings accounts, and lend out only that money which they have acquired in that manner.”
In addition to the rebel Conservative MPs, there is some heavyweight support for financial reform within the Palace of Westminster. On August 2, a letter from Lord Sudeley was published in the Daily Telegraph on the subject of banking without usury in which he pointed out that “The better practice of banking without usury is entirely possible. It happens now in Malaysia. During the 19th century, it happened in the opening up of the American West through the use of President Abraham Lincoln's debt or interest–free Greenbacks ” and “Usury was condemned by the best thinkers of the past: the Jews in the Old Testament, Aristotle, Mohammed and St Thomas Aquinas. The Vatican should issue an encyclical condemning the evil of usury, and provide us with its rationale for doing so. In the dire economic climate, this would be timely.”
An alternative to waiting for a pronouncement from the Pope would be to elect Ben Dyson Prime Minister; he and his Positive Money gang have already produced a draft bill that you can read – or listen to – here.
[The above op-ed was first published by Digital Journal on August 20, 2011.]
Return To Site Index