Financial Services Bill

Whatever happens to this Bill, this subject will not go away after the election. We are slightly barking up the wrong tree when we talk about "too big to fail". It seems to me that we are talking about "too big to manage" and that the shareholders are the ones who have got to be in the first instance more active in looking at their now virtually worthless investments. They should be asking whether these large organisations are too big and too complicated to manage, and could dissolve themselves out of existence. There is a precedent for that. The conglomerates in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s all grew in such a way that they became so complicated that eventually the late Lord Hanson had to keep buying businesses in order to stop the bicycle from falling over. When the bicycle eventually did fall over and he failed to buy ICI, everything had to be dissolved, and it was dissolved in quite an orderly way. In the Royal Bank of Scotland, Sir Fred Goodwin was showing signs of acting like Lord Hanson in that he had to keep buying to get bigger and bigger, and eventually the shareholders had to say enough is enough. That is happening now with the Royal Bank of Scotland, which is trying to get out of insurance and simplify itself. The route forward in the first instance must be for these large organisations to account to their shareholders for their activities, make them smaller and less complicated, and probably create shareholder value in the process.