Ministers must have the "humility" to admit that the government has made mistakes in the lead up to the financial crisis, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling said on Tuesday.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Darling conceded there were "a lot of lessons" for the government to learn from the events that led to the downturn. He said the regulation of banks had been a failure.
In the "first significant admission of responsibility from a senior government figure for the current economic crisis," Darling partly blamed ministers for allowing the financial markets to run out of control for much of the past decade.
During his time at the Treasury, Gordon Brown, the incumbent prime minister, established many of the regulatory rules now under scrutiny.
U.S. President Barack Obama has already expressed regret for the decisions made over the past decade. However, Brown has repeatedly blamed global forces for the problems, the Daily Telegraph said.
Only last week, the head of the government's financial watchdog said regulators had been under political pressure not to stop the reckless lending of banks.
In the interview, Darling appeared to blame the crisis on the bonus culture for encouraging bankers to take risks, while admitting that the government played a part in allowing it to develop.
"There are a lot of lessons to be learnt by regulators, governments, all of us," he said.
"The key thing that went wrong was that a culture was allowed to develop over the last 15 years or so where the relationship between what people did and what they got went way out of alignment, especially at the top end."
Although Darling believed that bank directors must be the first line of defense against poor or reckless decisions, he accepted there was a greater role for the government to intervene earlier if internal control fails in future.
The interview came as an opinion poll showed that the Conservatives are now more trusted by voters than the government to run the economy.
The ComRes poll for The Independent found 35 percent now believe that the Conservative Party has the ability to steer the country through the recession, with 28 percent putting their faith in Brown and Darling of the Labour Party.
(Xinhua News Agency March 3, 2009)
