We, the naive and pathetic taxpayers of the UK, most of us on PAYE so unable to find a way to avoid taxes, will soon get back the money we loaned to the likes of rbs and life will revert to something like normal: austerity will be shown the door, the public sector and the poor will stop carrying the can for all economic problems, the cuts will end, wages will rise above £6.50 an hour so we - the taxpayers again - is there a pattern developing here? - will no longer have to subsidise the wages of the 'working poor' - and I'll get a reasonable return on my savings once more.
If I sound bitter, it's because I am. I'm the mug who was tempted to join the Thatcherite 'property-owning democracy' of the 80s and then saw the mortgage rate rise pretty fast from 5% to 14%, watched my endowment policies decline till there was a gap of £35,000 and then - the final insult - saw the insurance policy I'd taken out to bridge the gap left by the failing endowment policies, not just fail to prosper but manage to lose - lose - £8,000 in under a year in a stock market that was doing so well for everybody else. (I seem to remember my lawyer who had arranged all these policies for me managed to cash in his own endowments in time and emerged with a nice new landrover, a trip on the Orient Express and the deposit on a holiday home - in Coupar, ffs).
But all is not lost, right?
Because the corruption and dishonesty that caused the biggest f*ckup in the history of capitalism are over, aren't they? It all happened before 2008 and the cost of 1.3 trillion pounds - that's £1,300,000, 000,000 - well that's a sad memory but it's in the past all the same. I honestly thought that was the case. I thought the wrong-doers inside the major UK banks had been caught and punished, or had at least been prevented from committing the same crimes again - and make no mistake, they committed crimes such as fraud, conspiracy and embezzlement.
But no. It turns out, some of the guys and gals were still defrauding us right up to 2013. That's last year, people. Five years after the collapse that we, the tax payers, had to save these banks from because they were 'too big to fail', they were still playing the market. Talking up Libor. Screwing money out of us, their employers, and in particular working people who have paid into pensions for the past 50 years thinking they were looking after their future.
And the banks are still standing there like huge monoliths out of 2001 A Space wotsit. Not split up. Still jeopardising the economy of the UK. And still demanding and getting huge bonuses. No one has gone to jail or even been fined. Apparently, we're all worried in case these golden guys and gals decide London is not a good place to work and head off elsewhere. They are that precious, these crooks. So here's an idea: let's charge a couple of bankers with fraud and, if possible, put them in jail. Pour encourager les autres. I've heard of a couple of people who tried to export the habits they had learned in the London financial market to Hong Kong and got fired within a year. There will be other folk around to take up their jobs - there always are.
And after we've dealt with these bankers, we need to split up the banks so the crash of 2008 never happens again. And we need to make sure the banks understand that they have failed. In fact, capitalism has failed. And we, the people who pay the bills, don't like it.
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