The least the Great Bank Robbers can do is hand back their loot

A crowd screaming for revenge is never a pretty sight, whether it is on the streets of some foreign city or the pages of the British press.

Nevertheless, it seems unfair that those convicted of the £2.6 million Great Train Robbery in 1963 copped 30 years in jail, while those responsible for the trillion pound Great Bank Robbery of 2008 remain not just at large but enjoying honours and plutocratic lifestyles derived from their entirely illusory “success”.

Running a bank hardly seems the most challenging job in the world, provided one applies a bit of common sense. Such as only lending money to individuals and companies who stand a sporting chance of being able to pay it back, even if the economy takes a turn for the worse.

In this context, it helps to be experienced enough to know that any politician who claims to have abolished boom and bust is utterly delusional.

As that damning Parliamentary report observed last week, Halifax Bank of Scotland was not a complicated business brought down by too-clever-by-half investment bankers or felled as collateral damage from the global financial collapse. It would have gone bust anyway because those in charge took irresponsible risks.

Since all of us are going to be paying for this mess through our taxes for years to come, it does not seem entirely equitable that one of the individuals chiefly responsible should be allowed to walk away with a cool £25 million in his pension fund, having retired at the implausibly early age of 50 a couple of years before the wheels fell off.

Sir, sorry Mr, James Crosby

The cult of comparative youth gives us chief executives at 40 who cannot possibly be expected to hold such high pressure jobs for more than a decade. And Prime Ministers of a similar age who have never held any real job outside politics and reach the top after less than ten years in Parliament.

With the utmost respect, how can anyone without the experience of things going wrong the last time around be expected to make the right decisions to prevent it happening again?

One of my first assignments as a junior PR executive was the flotation of a computer leasing company. I met huge scepticism from cynical old hacks who explained to me why this sort of business was doomed to go bust. I was well equipped with a sheaf of counter-arguments on why it was all going to be different this time around.

And guess what? It wasn’t.

All the fuss about corporate governance in recent years has completely failed to stop top executive pay being ratcheted up to such an extent that it has completely lost touch not only with the rewards available to the average worker, but with reality itself. But it has ensured the compulsory retirement of experienced non-executive directors on the grounds that they have been on boards too long to be “independent”.

Instead of fussing about boardroom diversity, the focus should be on making more room towards the top for those with experience, scepticism and an aversion to greed. At the very least these older folk could play the role of the slave in Roman triumphs, whispering reminders of their mortality in the ears of the people in charge.

I will admit that it may not work. I spent much of the weekend trying to instruct my three-year-old on how to operate his electric train set. As usual, my warnings were dismissed with the confident assertion that “The thing is, Daddy, I know all about trains”. A spectacular crash duly ensued.

But at least when the Parliamentary report on the next British corporate train wreck comes to be written, there will be a few more greybeards around to utter the words “I told you so”.

As for those who baled out at 50 from a high-flying business that then plunged spectacularly to earth, the only honourable course is surely to hand back the loot. As an elderly striver myself, I can assure you that you are not too old to make a fresh start, ideally in an area more suited to your talents.

I haven’t seen a whelk stall in years so a highly suitable gap in the market clearly exists.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally NOT published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, because it was due to appear on Tuesday 9 April and wasn't about Margaret Thatcher.

Small satisfaction in being proved right as the storm clouds gather

I find it hard to believe that almost two decades have passed since the Conservative party was tearing itself apart over John Major’s determination to ratify the Maastricht treaty, despite Britain’s ignominious exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism.

"Bastards!"

That, it seemed to me, should have been evidence enough of the utter folly of attempting to lock exchange rates between divergent economies. But the ideologues pressed on regardless with their creation of the euro as a means to advance the cause of a single government for Europe.

Turned out well, hasn’t it? Having been castigated as a backward-looking little Englander for opposing this half-witted project, I hope I may be forgiven a moment of quiet satisfaction as I read the recantations of many of the scheme’s cheerleaders; there was a particular corker in one of the Sunday papers from the former editor of the Financial Times.

But unfortunately we are where we are: in the most horrible mess, with deeply depressing implications for prosperity, democracy and even peace.

Images of Greek protesters and rioters have been removed to avoid potential charges (financial, not criminal) from the money-grubbing image copyright police.

All going terribly well

In the early 1990s I had regular arguments with a distinguished client who was one of the leading lights of the pro-euro campaign. When his economic arguments failed, as they always did, he fell back on the spectre of war. Binding Europe together with a single currency was the only way to preserve the peace that had lasted since 1945.

It always seemed to me to be taking an excessively negative view of the Germans to believe that the only way to stop the Panzers once more rolling into Poland or Alsace was to give Germany a pivotal role in the economic management of the whole Continent.

Far more likely, I argued, that the creation and inevitable collapse of a supranational authority with no popular mandate would ultimately cause conflict, rather than preventing it.

It gives me no pleasure at all to note that this is exactly how it looks today, as the elected governments of Greece and Italy are deposed in favour of administrations led by “technocrats”.

This may not sound too bad, particularly as an alternative to a buffoon like Berlusconi. But how would we have felt if Gordon Brown had exited Number 10 not following a General Election, but because he had simply been sacked by the Queen, acting as proxy for the European Commission, and replaced by Baroness Ashton or Mervyn King?

Surely it is worth bearing in mind that the global banking crisis was the creation of the technical experts in that field, and that what we desperately needed was not more technocrats but more lay people with a smattering of common sense saying loudly and repeatedly “Hang on, this is completely mad.”

Right now, the ways forward seem to be the collapse of the euro, causing widespread economic misery; Germany picking up the gigantic bill to keep the euro together, which its taxpayers will not wear; or China backing down on its unsporting refusal to drop a few trillions into the proffered European hat.

Whichever way it goes, the implications look bleak for the future of democracy, and the avoidance of civil unrest and international tension. Yes, those of us who argued against British membership of the euro have done the country a service by keeping us off the passenger list of the doomed liner, but our rather frail craft stands no chance of enjoying a smooth passage as the whirlpool of catastrophe on the Continent does its best to suck us down.

So we sceptics were bang right. Big deal. Move on. But do please bear this lesson in mind the next time someone tries to sell you an idea wrapped up in the phraseology of progressiveness and inevitability.

A rare image of a wind turbine actually doing something

I will take similar momentary satisfaction, a decade or two from now, when the eager proponents of wind power finally admit that they were completely wrong. But by then our finest landscapes will have been desecrated by useless turbines, and we will be sitting in the cold and dark. And there will be no quick, easy and painless solution to that avoidable mess, either.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.