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  You can't blame Brown for the low base rate Barry, one of the things he did in 1997 was to remove the setting of rates from political control and leave it to the market and the BoE- an act for which he was widely applauded at the time.
  
  It was the fragmentation of the BoE's regulatory function which let the fox into the henhouse because there were areas left without any agency tasked with their oversight. One of these was the setting of Libor. Pre 1997 I remember a number of occasions when a Libor was 'corrected' a few minutes after being set because the Old Lady had 'had a word' with a certain Japanese institution which used to set its Libor quotes unreasonably high.
  
  Another perennial problem is that, with lamentably few exceptions, neither politicians, the media nor the general public have anywhere near the depth of knowledge or understanding about financial markets to make a value judgment based on the few facts which are in the public domain.
  
  PS Bob Diamond was a typical over-promoted T-bond trader and salesman with a good grasp of man-management but (at least when he joined Barclays) no real knowledge of the City.

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