The true scandal of cancelled PMQ is revealed

David Randall and Margareta Pagano reveal in detail in today's Independent on Sunday, linked here, the massive confidence trick for which our useless opposition parties fell last Wednesday and even more shamefully have continued so to do ever since. I quote the guts of the issue below but please read the whole dreadful report in full as it describes the condemnation of a once great nation to grinding poverty for decades ahead: Yet all the while, behind this smokescreen, hundreds of billions of taxpayers' cash was being committed to the banks on terms that seemed bewildering. This – the biggest leap in the dark in British economic history – is what the row over Fred's pension concealed. It is a story that should now be told.

For a long time, it has been known that the big scheduled domestic event of last week would be RBS's results. Their gargantuan size was widely expected, and the final figures didn't disappoint: £24.1bn in the red – bigger than any American bank could manage, vastly outscoring some of the week's other losses (such as housebuilder Barratt's £592m), and relegating to barely visible footnotes the other depressing statistics of the week, such as household spending declining at its fastest rate since 1991; house prices down 15 per cent in a year; and service sector job losses at a 10-year high.

RBS's losses, and those of Lloyds HBOS the following day, meant a further extension to the Government's bailout, and taxpayers' exposure. The size of the potential commitment to the banks is estimated at £1.3trn, equivalent to the value of the British economy for a whole year, and a burden equal to possibly as much as £36,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. And there could yet be more unpleasant discoveries. Looming rather less large in the public consciousness than Sir Fred's pot was the appearance before the Treasury Select Committee of Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England. Fully five months after the present crisis began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September, he told MPs that it is still not known just how big the liabilities of British banks are. In his evidence to the Treasury Select Committee last week, he said it would take "many months" to establish the scale of toxic assets held by banks, requiring a detailed assessment contract by contract.

I wrote last Wednesday in a comment to the Conservative Home blog that history would be the judge of whether cancellation of PMQ was proper. I had not suspected that this Sunday the truth would so quickly begin to emerge. Justification has begun to appear in the form of a typically fawning column in the Sunday Telegraph from Matthw d'Ancona, linked here.

It is still too soon since the death of David Cameron's son to fully dissect the neglect of his role as Leader of the Opposition that must have occurred in the intense love and care Mr Cameron poured on his sickly son. The role of his friends and close shadow cabinet colleagues also need to be the topic of clear debate in the weeks ahead, as does his selection as a leadership candidate for his party in the face of his overwhelming personal obligations and finally and at long last the methodology by which that election took place which was contrary to all accepted international understanding for a fair ballot, as I blogged extensively at the time on Teetering Tories.

The end result of all this is now beginning to be glimpsed, brought about by Blair and Brown, but unopposed by the Conservatives - handing of self-governance to the EU, the destruction of the complete geographical construct of the UK through devolution and the the total economic laying to waste of Britain's economy.