I entirely agree with that. I also agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw that it would be good to see the Halifax building society separated out from Lloyds HBOS, so that what was the country’s leading firm could be relocated and its decisions could once again be made in Halifax, rather than in the City of London.
Let us remember that while the people who are nursing the sick and carrying out operations in hospitals, the people who are teaching our children, the people who are policing our streets and the people who are risking their lives to fight fires are being restricted, HSBC is paying 204 people more than £1 million a year, Barclays is paying 428 people more than £1 million a year and RBS is paying 95 people more than £1 million a year. They are being paid those sums to play with other people’s money. That is all they are doing; if they lose but cannot go broke, they are clearly not playing with their own money. But not everyone at Barclays is getting £1 million a year; 100,000 people working for that bank are paid at a level that entitles them to child tax credit. What is more, it is people such as them all around the country who have been losing their jobs while that collection of losers at the top carry on.
Then we have the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, whose top priority in Europe is to prevent those horrible Europeans from imposing a limit on bankers’ bonuses. We used to be told that if we imposed such limits, the bankers would go elsewhere. We were told that they would go to Switzerland. Well, they will not be doing that since the referendum in that country, because they would now be worse off there than they would be here. Would they perhaps go to the United States? Some of them would have to think very carefully about that, because money launderers can be locked up over there, and that has indeed happened, even to Brits.
What all this boils down to is that the banking industry does not need mild tinkering; it needs a total worldwide transformation. Instead of acting as the back marker in the convoy, we ought to be out there banging a drum and getting a grip on the world banking industry, for the benefit of ordinary people in virtually every part of the world.
7.3 pm