George Osborne dismisses judge-led banking probe call

George Osborne has urged Labour to "see sense" and drop its demands for a judge-led inquiry into the rate-rigging scandal at Barclays Bank. The House of Lords will vote on the opposition's proposal today, which the chancellor said it was likely to lose. He told the BBC that the government's plan for an inquiry by a committee of peers and MPs would "put it right" more quickly by allowing rapid legal change. But Labour insists a judge is needed to ensure thorough reform of banking. Last week, regulators in the US and UK fined Barclays £290m for attempting to rig Libor and Euribor, the interest rates at which banks lend to each other, which underpin trillions of pounds worth of financial transactions, during the middle and end of the last decade. The bank's chief executive Bob Diamond has resigned with immediate effect after Labour and others called on him to do so.