Claim 93601391Checked 09 Jul 2026
FalseOn the truth scale
“Those rules had been in place for seven decades.”
Reasoning & Evidence09 Jul 2026
The claim overstates the length of the relevant rules. The Bank of England’s own history says UK bank supervision operated informally until the 1970s, and that Parliament first gave the Bank formal supervisory responsibility in 1979, not seven decades earlier. The Bank of England Act 1998 then transferred supervision from the Bank to the FSA, effective in 1998. If the speaker instead meant the U.S. Glass-Steagall separation, Federal Reserve History says it dated from 1933 and was repealed in 1999, which is about 66 years, not seven decades. Sources: Bank of England, “Clinical supervision” (`https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/speech/2026/may/sam-woods-speech-at-the-henry-thornton-lecture-bayes-business-school`); Bank of England, “The Bank of England Act” (`https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/1998/q2/the-bank-of-england-act`); Federal Reserve History, “Banking Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall)” (`https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/glass-steagall-act`).
From article
But they were allowed to. Who let them do it? Moronic politicians, who changed rules we’d had for seven decades. Take America – [Alan] Greenspan got rid of the Glass-Steagall Act.5The Banking Act of 1933, which separated investment banking from commercial banks. Its effectual repeal in 1999 allowed Wall Street to gamble with money deposited in commercial banks. Look what that moron [Gordon] Brown did! He took away control of the banking industry from the Bank of England and gave it to a bunch of tick-box bureaucrats at the [Financial Services Authority]. Catastrophic, catastrophic errors of judgement!
Sources opened+ 78 search hits considered
| [1] | bankofengland.co.uk |