Let us cast our minds back to those happy days when such quaint people as local bank managers still existed. Do you remember them? They carried rolled umbrellas and often wore bowler hats which they raised to their lady customers when they met them in the high street.
Although rather stuffy, they were respected in their communities and sometimes slightly feared, since they could be stern with customers who went beyond their overdraft limit or were financially irresponsible in some other way. People grew nervous when they received a summons to “come in for a chat” with their bank manager. They knew they were in for a wigging, however gently administered.
But their status in the community was substantial, and largely deserved, because they helped to keep it functioning. They were the first port of call for local businessmen who were doing well and wanted to expand, and also for those who were running into difficulty and needed some help to tide them over. They didn’t lend money to people who patently couldn’t pay it back; but they weren’t unnecessarily tight-fisted either.
But suppose one of those small farmers or shopkeepers who had been rescued from failure by a bank loan eventually recovered and actually began to do well. And suppose that he proceeded to spend his newly-earned profits on a posh BMW with its boot filled with vintage champagne while neglecting to pay back the bank’s loan.
Such a person, I suspect, would have received a pretty stiff letter from his bank manager, demanding instant repayment.
Nowadays, of course, the local branch manager is an extinct species. My branch doesn’t seem to have anyone answering to the title of manager at all. What’s more, it actually keeps its telephone number secret from its customers, forcing them to call the central “customer services” line, where they have to go through the nightmare “press one, press two, press three….” obstacle course just to get an answer to the simplest query.
That is bad enough for just the ordinary family customer. But it is doubly difficult for those local businessmen trying to get loans either to keep themselves afloat or to help them build on success. Even if they find some faceless corporate bureaucrat to whom they can put their case, the odds are that they will be turned away empty handed.
The reason is perfectly simple. The banks can’t lend to their customers because
the money – taxpayers’ money that was given to the banks with the express purpose of lending it to small businesses – has already been piled up in sackloads so that it can be paid out to top bank employees in astronomical bonuses.
Now, I can’t help feeling that Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is in very much the same relationship to the big banks as old-fashioned branch managers used be in with their customers.
He may lack the bowler hat and the rolled umbrella, but they came to him in desperation when they were on their uppers a year ago, and he gave them the loans they needed to stay afloat.
And now, like the profligate farmer mentioned above, they are making profits again, and instead of fulfilling their obligations to those who bailed them out, they are squandering their newly recovered wealth on the mega-equivalent of silver BMWs and cases of Krug. Moreover, the situation is compounded by the way they have rediscovered profitability.
Thanks entirely to the policies which the Treasury and the Bank of England put in place to fight the credit crunch (most notably the infinitesimal, 0.5 per cent bank rate), they are able to borrow very cheap indeed and – because of the mortgage drought created by the banks themselves – to lend very, very dear. It is a bankers’ paradise beyond the wildest dreams of people who faced catastrophe just one year ago.
So it is time for Darling to put on his bowler hat and sign that branch manager’s letter to the profligate farmer. It should say unequivocally: “No more silver BMWs, no more Krug, until you carry out your undertakings to me about your future behaviour.”
And if they won’t? Well, the Chancellor has one advantage not possessed by the bank managers of old: he owns three of the five banks in question. He can sack the buggers if he wants to. Get on with it, Alistair.
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Although I am not a religious person, I am very definitely a Protestant agnostic, and not a Catholic agnostic. So I feel entitled to be annoyed by Pope Benedict XVI’s blatant bid to hijack a chunk of our established Protestant church. No wonder they call him the Panzer Pope.
As Cardinal Ratzinger, he was in charge of Roman Catholic doctrine for many years before he ascended the Papal throne. So he is the man to blame for most of the nasty things the Church did in Africa and South America over AIDS and the ban on condoms.
Is this the sort of guy our Anglo-Catholic clergy want to cosy up to, just to protect them from the shock of seeing a woman in a mitre? I mean, dammit, they all wear frocks.
