Standard & Poor has already decided that a downgrading of UK borrowing safety is now inevitable, The Slog has learned.

S&P having downgraded UK bank credit ratings on January 26th, US sources close to the rating agency Fitch told The Slog this morning “we can’t see any alternative to a further downgrade…and where we go, S&P tend to follow”.

I understand that Fitch executives are ‘dismayed’ by the mixed signals from both Government and Opposition so far in 2010.

S&P last Friday informally rated the UK alongside Chile and Potugal as a credit risk. It told the media that Britain ‘has failed to introduce proper safeguards in the wake of the global credit crisis’ and raised the spectre of a further sovereign credit downgrade before the General Election.

The Slog has been receiving off the record feedback from the US banking sector on this subject for some weeks, but this is the first time ratings sector sources have spoken to us.
While disastrous for Gordon Brown, it is equally damning of the Opposition’s so-called ‘mixed signals’…a situation highlighted by Lord Mandelson yesterday.