Mervyn King and Alistair Darling clash over banking supervision reforms

In the linked article, Merv "the swerve" King is reported as arguing last night for more teeth in the Bank of England's banking sector supervision role. Later at the same meeting, Alistair Darling told the same crowd he sees no need for the BoE to be given any more teeth -- the private sector bank executives were at fault and need to clean up their game pronto. (He would say that, wouldn't he -- given he is the head of the Treasury, therefore he is 1/3rd responsible for banking supervision... so you can be sure he is going to point the finger at someone else, and hey the voters have been led to hate the bankers right now so let's go with that!)

My own take on this is: Mervyn is fighting for the very slight chance the UK will be allowed to retain control of its own financial sector, if only he can demonstrate the BoE will keep the banks under its thumb in future, while Alistair already knows that we are going to roll over and allow our financial sector to be controlled by Brussells, and he doesn't want to waste any more time, effort and money on twiddling around the edges. I think we're going 'all in', whether we like it or not.