I think everyone in the House would welcome a step forward in trying to gain some control over the excesses of the banking industry, but most Members—at least those who have spoken—seem to be dubious about whether the Bill goes far enough. Following on from the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann), I tend to be what might be described as a “Bassetlaw-ist”. I think we need to go much further than most people are proposing.
We need to start by recognising that the British banking industry is a failure—it was a failure and it remains a failure. Let me remind the House that, of the big four, HSBC lost $27 billion in the crash, while RBS lost $14 billion, Barclays lost $8 billion and Lloyds lost $5 billion. Between them, these masters of the universe lost $54 billion in the crash. It did them harm, but it did a lot more harm to the rest of us. In the recession that has followed their lunacy—matched all round the world by the rest of the world banking industry—British production has lost £700 billion, as a result of the reduction in goods and services that we have produced.
That is what the banks dropped us in. They did it through all sorts of fancy schemes, in an effort to get rich quick, and for quite a long time they did get rich
quick. Everybody was told, “You can’t stop us. We know what we’re doing; it’s the market.” Then the market crashed. Under normal rules, if the market crashes, those who crash stay crashed, but that does not happen with banking. That is why we need to change the rules. The banks demanded taxpayers’ money, either to bail them out or offer them guarantees. They said, “You’ve got to do it, otherwise we will bring the temple down and we’ll bring you all down with us.” In other words, “Heads we win, tails you lose” has been the motto of the banking industry.
That is not all that the banks were doing wrong, we now discover. They were also rigging LIBOR—the London interbank offered rate. Individuals in banks were fiddling, and apparently not a single boss knew what was going on. LIBOR was run by the British Bankers Association, which apparently did not know that any fiddles were going on, so obviously “Ignorance is strength”—this year is the centenary of George Orwell’s birth—was the motto of the British banking industry. People have been prosecuted or threatened with prosecution—they have settled to avoid it—in the United States for LIBOR fiddles, but nobody has been prosecuted here. Why is that?
There have been several repeated conspiracies—in fact, dozens and dozens of them—to gain financial advantage by deception, which is a common-law crime, so we do not need an Act of Parliament, but we now know that LIBOR rigging was not the banks’ only wrongdoing. Instead of “The world’s local bank”, HSBC’s motto turns out to be “The world’s local money launderer —helping Mexican drug barons, fighting the United States’ anti-terrorism sanctions”. Lloyds—motto: “Banking worth talking about”—was involved in money laundering to help sanctions-busters. Barclays—“It’s our business to know your business”—was involved in dodgy transactions and busting sanctions against Iran, Libya and Burma. Most of us would think that sanctions against Iran, Gaddafi’s Libya and Burma were quite appropriate.
The banks have also been spending a great deal of time promoting tax dodging. The big four have 1,649 subsidiary companies. For Barclays, HSBC and the Royal Bank of Scotland, a third of those companies are in—where would you guess?—the places where tax is fiddled. They are in tax avoidance places—Lloyds is a bit better, with only 20%.
Up to now, most criticism, both here and in the newspapers and so on, has been of the investment bankers speculating—“It’s a casino. Separate it out; ring-fence it; break it up”—on the grounds, apparently, that retail banking has been a really big success, when actually it has an appalling record. It was the retail arms of the big four that did all the PPI fiddles and the IRSA—interest rate swap arrangements—swindles. Indeed, the big four sold 34 million payment protection insurance polices. Between them, they are now having to set aside £14 billion to repay people who were swindled. That is what the money is for—simple stuff: it is a swindle. Between them, the big four are employing 10,000 people to administer the system of repaying the money they swindled. It is almost a banking job creation scheme.
Then there are the retail banks’ interest rate swap arrangements. Some 40,000 agreements with small and medium firms are now being reviewed. The idea was sold by the British Bankers Association to
“help insulate business customers against fluctuations in interest rates,”
as the BBA put it, but that is exactly what interest rate swap arrangements did not do. A sample survey shows that 90% of the agreements being reviewed break existing banking regulations, yet small firms were bullied into accepting their terms in order to get a new loan or extend an existing one—if they did not agree, they would not get it.