the RESPECT party

Can British banks behave any worse? In the last week, the last vestige of morality in the banking system has been shown to be an illusion. Barclays Bank, the institution that desperately invested in South African apartheid, thumped its chest and proclaimed that it was not at risk during the credit crisis of 2007-9. While Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS, Northern Rock and Lloyds TSB were given huge bail outs and partially nationalized by the Labour government, Bob Diamond at Barclays declared that Barclays Bank did not need any state help.

All the time, the reality was that a gigantic fraud was being perpetrated to make the bank look more stable and risk free than it was. The daily lending interest rate between banks that enables them to function and move money around the financial system (LIBOR) was being manipulated to make Barclays and other British banks look more attractive than their real accounts would show. This defrauded investors and lenders but the biggest scandal is that this enabled banks to loan to each other at a much lower rate of interest than they charged customers and the public. In other words, this was an almighty scam that generated profit for the banks.


If European and US banking were a car showroom, you would be looking at one clapped out old banger after another with salesmen like Bob Diamond, Chancellor George Osborne and his predecessor Alastair Darling trying to sell you one of them by pointing out the lovely finish and bodywork while not mentioning that the engine didn’t work and the exhaust spewed out poison. The truth is that much of the international banking system has so much debt that it is bankrupt and that this has been a developing crisis for ten years.

Banks have not been effectively controlled, have no accountability and pathetic regulation due to thirty years of governments (Conservative and Labour) surrendering to the ‘free market’ nonsense that has created such suffering and poverty for the rest of us. As banking gambles on property have failed, they have tried to get money back through more and more fraudulent practices such as the PPI insurance scam and manipulation of the price of loans at a number of levels. If Conservative and Labour governments were unaware, they have proved their utter incompetence and the failure of ‘light touch regulation’. If they were aware, they are guilty of helping in colossal fraud that has cost the population.

If any working class person committed fraud, they could expect prison. The sentences delivered for the young people involved in rioting last year were astonishing with a young woman in Manchester given a prison sentence for accepting an item of clothing from a looted shop. Yet corporate looting has reached incredible proportions and no one is being arrested. There are no wanted posters for Bob Diamond and his ilk. Instead, there is a minimum of £30million of pay off for him personally for overseeing acts of corporate looting and fraud that have cost us all.

What has been the response of the elite that controls this country? Conservative and Labour governments have printed huge sums of money to help the banks make more profit. Quantitative Easing (QE) has come to mean giving money to the banks with the cover story of saying that banks should lend to business and consumers. The banks ignore this condition and simply start gambling with the money to make more money to cover the black holes in their finances. So far, this has cost the British economy over £375 billion and it has only had two effects: the banks keep asking for more and the gambling of world food prices has created waves of starvation and food price inflation.

The banking system needs urgent reform. There needs to be a withdrawal of banking license from any bank committing fraud. The big banks that dominate and endanger the British economy must be broken up and their destructive power removed. There needs to be much tighter regulation and policing of the financial sector and markets to prevent corporate looting. To generate investment in jobs and services, money should be funnelled through a Peoples bank shaped from the nationalized banks and the Post Office network. To generate money to help deliver this investment, there should be a tax on all deals in the financial markets. This could wipe out government debt at a stroke.

Can we expect such policies from the ConDem government of the bankers and their mates or the same Labour party that loved up to Murdoch? No. There needs to be a challenge to the governing elite in Britain and it will not come from the three big parties.