Jodrell Bankers

When I was at school, in the heady days of the 1960's, in the white heat of Wilson's technological revolution, Jodrell Bank's famous radio telescope was often in the news. It didn't take a crowd of snotty nosed 13 year old boys long to start sniggering and using "Jodrell Bank" as cockney rhyming slang for a particular act of self-abuse.

The connection between "Bank" and "Wank" has been brought home again by a few pieces of news I've spotted this week.

The Credit Crunch "proper" happened before I started doing this blog, but had I been blogging at the time I think I would have said in no uncertain terms that I was not happy about the fact that the only choice available to me was either to stand by and watch as the capitalist system collapsed and slid into the River Hudson, or to stand by and watch while the politicians pumped in gazillions of our money in the form of taxes to prop them up so we could all keep going. Either way, we lost, either way we were shafted.

True, the potential burden of higher taxes and a world-wide recession is slightly preferable to having to scramble for hunks of bread thrown off the back of an army lorry while the troops fire warning shots at the looters, but what a choice, eh?

And all the time these bastards in stripey suits were oppressing us and making us do cash flows and projections and charging us a fortune in bank charges, they were actually taking our money and buying recycled mortgages that shysters in America had granted to old guys sitting on porches picking banjos, people who had no collateral apart from a houn' dawg and a pick up truck. Either that, or they were pissing it away investing in Iceland, a volcano surrounded by haddock.

Well, we've bailed them out, in my case under local anaesthetic and with great reluctance, and we've seen Swervin' Mervyn cut interest rates to their lowest in 50 years, and we all sat back and waited for the economy to fire up again and for the wheels to start turning... and we're still waiting.

In the meantime, credit card borrowing has increased in price, and HBOS have apparently had a party that cost them (ie us) £300,000. In the circumstances you could be forgiven for thinking that it would have been better to have just let the banks go to the wall and given the money directly to small businesses instead. Instead of lending them our money so they could lend it back to us at rates too far above the base rate, and siphon off the surplus into parties and bonuses.

There is NO WAY that these bastards should just be allowed to swallow the bail-out whole, give a huge self-satisfied belch of relief, and then batten down the hatches for the mixture as before, while the rest of us suffer for their mistakes.

I'd like to see taxation at 100% on bank bonus payments over a certain figure, I'd like to see the banks being forced to declare their actual trading position so they can then abandon this deadlock of not lending to each other because they don't know who's solvent and who isn't, and I'd like to see them being forced to use their redundant branches, where there have been enforced mergers, to keep open socially useful post offices in the areas of previous post office closure.

We have been ripped off by energy companies hammering us with unscrupulous price rises. We've been ripped off by oil companies increasing prices at the pumps because the price of oil went up to $150 a barrel, then leaving their pump price there for weeks after the oil barrel price fell back to $47 a barrel, we are NOT going to be ripped off by banks failing to pass on the benefit of the cut in Bank of England base rates, and we are looking to our politicians to do something about it. And come election time, I for one, in this wonderfully marginal constituency of the Holme Valley, will be making sure that they know that their actions have been scrutinised.