The Guardian website this morning was offering the headline, "Cameron calls for reform of banking regulations", while Conservative Home is retailing a comment attributed to Cameron that, "Gordon Brown's regulatory mechanism has comprehensively failed".

More detail comes from The Press Association which has Cameron saying that there had been "failure of regulation" in the financial sector, adding that the government had been wasting time rather than reforming the system.
A propos our previous post, Cameron is playing with fire taking this line. For sure, it is generally agreed that there has indeed been a "failure of regulation", but by far the bulk of regulation, and the regulatory structures, are of EU origin. They are not within the gift of Cameron to change, without taking on the European Union, which the leader of the opposition shows no sign of doing. But to pretend that they are "Gordon Brown's" is a very silly strategy indeed.

Furthermore, Cameron is wrong factually in stating that "the government had been wasting time rather than reforming the system," when the last ten years has seen a torrent of legislation dealing with the "reform" of financial services regulation, and indeed the financial services industry albeit of EU origin, or influenced by the EU.

More particularly, it is particularly dangerous politically to describe the regulation as "Gordon Brown's". If Cameron and his team insist on thus defining it, the natural inference is that a Conservative government would make changes to it – would undertake the "reform", the lack of which Cameron is lamenting. Yet, for the reasons elucidated, this is not within his gift.
Such matters as capital adequacy, however, are defined by the Capital Requirements Directive (CRD), comprising Directive 2006/48/EC and Directive 2006/49/EC. These implement the Basel 2 agreement and are not within the gift of any British chancellor to change unilaterally.

Further, while Osborne talks glibly about raising the compensation payable to depositors in the event of a bank failure, from £35,000 to £50,000. Compensation is an issue dealt with by Directive 97/9/EC, which means this area is one of those notorious " occupied fields" about which, as we have observed previously, Osborne seems to have limited knowledge.

However, with this as with all the other pronouncements, the two words completely missing from the discourse are "European Union". This accords with the general Conservative policy of not mentioning "Europe", but it will not wash. There are far too many people out there who are fully aware of the role of the EU in so many areas of our national life.