Gordon Brown: "Markets need morals"

Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a renewed focus on fairness and responsibility to support the UK banking system, while speaking at the Fabian Society New Year Conference.

"Markets need morals. Without the underpinning values of fairness and responsibility, markets will not self correct or regulate but sometimes self destruct."

The Prime Minister instead argued for a moral banking system which is supported by the social values of fairness and responsibility shared by ordinary people:

"In this crisis, I have learned what was always implicit in our New Labour message, but we now have to make absolutely explicity: a fundamentally ethical message, that we have to bring to markets something they cannot generate themselves, - the values of fairness and responsibility which we celebrate in our everyday lives."