Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the...
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I would not call for a return to the authoritarian right, but the present Government is in a predicament. It does not wish to politicise the civil service, the media etc, but how can it do this when it is packed with Labour sycophants who have benefited in terms of personal power and wealth from the last wasteful Labour Government?
I have noticed that our MP has backed David Milliband. He like his colleagues seem content to sit on the opposition benches and jeer at Tory cuts. When the economy is right I expect he will be wanting a come back with a ministerial role. What a bunch of charlatans!
I hope the people have better memories when the cuts start to bite. These are Labour's debts!
Labour was running a huge deficit, criticised by independent observers and even one or two who are broadly friendly to them as being dangerously large, even while the economy was charging ahead. It's because we started from that position that the recession made the increase in public debt so much worse.
These ARE Labour's debts and Labour's cuts.
We supported the bail-out but did not support quantitative easing.
The bail out money was supposed to go to support bank's balance sheets, and most of it did (though we need to keep a careful eye on the bonuses paid by those banks in which the taxpayer has been forced to become a major investor.)
The QE money was created by, and consists of, balancing entries in the balance sheets of first the Bank of England, and then of the clearing banks: entries in bank accounts represent spendable money, but there are liabilities (debts to and from the central bank) to match the assets. So the answer to your question about where the money is, is "in their accounts." There is a fairly clear explanation under "Quantitive Easing" on Wikipedia which begins as follows:
"A central bank implements QE by first crediting its own account with money it has created ex nihilo ("out of nothing").[1] It then purchases financial assets, including government bonds, mortgage-backed securities and corporate bonds, from banks and other financial institutions in a process referred to as open market operations. The purchases, by way of account deposits, give banks the excess reserves required for them to create new money, and thus a hopeful stimulation of the economy, by the process of deposit multiplication from increased lending in the fractional reserve banking system."
Conservative ministers have been strongly encouraging the banks to lend more to businesses in general and small businesses in particular, Lib/Dem ministers have been making more threatening noises, but both have made clear that banks which have been given taxpayers' money to avoid a collapse are expected to use it for that purpose.