I'm a wobbly jelly, you're a pink blancmange

I'm a sherry trifle, you're a chocolate sponge

The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, circa 1968

If I'm a mop then you are a broom, a broom that is cleaning up the mess left by the Labour government and a fantastic job you are doing.

And I thank you and I congratulate you and your colleagues George Osborne, the dustpan, Michael Gove, the J Cloth, William Hague, the sponge. 

The BoJo Dave Doo Dah Band, getting wacky in October 2013

Hey, Boris, I think you missed at bit. Look at this great big spill over here:

And this [the regulatory failure that caused the global financial crisis of 2008] was a matter, first, of dogma - they [Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke] are just horrifically opposed to anything regulatory, but it is also the international competition in laxity. The race to the bottom between the United States and the United Kingdom, the City of London in particular, and the City of London won that race to the bottom. But it meant that all regulation in the West was completely degraded in this stupid competition to see who could have the weakest regulation...

...What do we need to do, what can we do, in all of this? We need to change the perverse incentive structures that produce these recurrent epidemics of accounting control fraud that are driving our crises. So we have to first get rid of the systemically dangerous institutions. These are the so-called "too big to fail" institutions. We need to shrink them to the point, within the next five years, that they no longer pose a systemic risk. Right now, they are ticking time bombs that will cause a global crisis as soon as the next one fails. Not if, when.

Second thing we need to do is completely reform modern executive professional compensation, which is what they used to suborn the appraisers, remember they were pressuring the appraisers through the compensation system, trying to produce what we call a Gresham's Dynamic, in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the marketplace, and they largely succeeded, which is how the fraud became endemic.

And the third thing that we need to do, is to deal with what we call the three "Ds"; deregulation, de-supervision and the de facto decriminalisation.

Because we can make all three of these changes and if we do so, we can dramatically reduce how often we have a crisis and how severe these crises are.

Bill Black, helpfully pointing out the huge mess left by BoJo's chums in the City and suggesting where he and his chums could usefully put their mop, broom, dustpan, J Cloth, sponge or other hilarious metaphor to work, should they be remotely interested in doing a proper cleaning job.

Sorry for sounding like a stuck record, but if the Tories and their junior coalition partners insist on endlessly banging on about the mess they inherited, somebody needs to keep banging on about who actually created the mess and asking why they consistently keep opposing measures to clear up the mess and actively promoting that giant messy play area known as The City of London. It's almost as if their declared interest in clearing up and preventing future spillages is all hot air and, worse than that, the precise opposite of the truth:

 ...if what got us all this debt in the first place was a "too big to fail" banking system that was bailed out at taxpayer expense, you would expect the government to make sure that we don't "simply try and rebuild the same type of economy we had before the crash", as the prime minister put it in his speech. But of course, quite the opposite has happened. The government has deliberately stoked another London-centred housing bubble just in time for re-election using a right to buy scheme that basically gives anyone that qualifies their own personal Fannie and Freddie mortgage guarantee. Meanwhile, British banks are bigger than ever and are expected to grow bigger still.

Mark Blyth in The Guardian

When the cleaning contract goes out to tender in 2015, we need a better team of sanitation operatives, because this lot are useless. Let's just hope we don't have a major spill before then.