Something you can bank on!

Commercial banks’ reported increases in profits extracted from British customers are a disgraceful way to get back money they lost with imprudent investments and reckless lending. They are all up to it. It is another industry wide phenomenon. If there was anything resembling genuine, service based competition it could not be happening. This greedy and anti-social industry competes only to the extent of how long-standing customers can be cheated of fair rates of interest on their savings, hit by outrageous charges and palmed off with low quality services in understaffed branches. There is a desperate need for a real alternative operating on near-forgotten principles of service with fairness and responsibility - principles discarded by today’s banking barrow boys. But wait! I take back that comparison; it’s an insult to the fruit and veg. trade.
The great city of Birmingham once offered a trustworthy banking service in the form of the Municipal Bank. Many citizens lament its loss and still cherish their old passbooks. I would like to see the establishment of a new Municipal Bank offering fair and consistent rates for ordinary savers, encouraging thrift and discouraging the practice of living on tick so rampant in today’s society and, until caught out, so profitable for bloated bankers.
A Municipal Bank could create money and jobs in Birmingham and be the means through which City Bonds could be issued to allow ordinary folk to support civic projects while offering a secure return. It is true that the banks could and probably would attempt to stifle such an initiative with anti-competitive practices. These could be overcome, and perhaps the exodus of customers would lead some banks to start mending their ways. Birmingham could lead the way as it did in the early days of commercial banking. This is why I have been campaigning for the return of a genuine Municipal Bank (they exist in name for very restricted services to council staff in some other authorities) even though the Government has made this even more difficult since 2000.
We have seen and heard enough to be sure that unless they are forced to do so, banks, like many other services, will not reform of their own accord. To get back to services that put ordinary people first, my view is that direct intervention is needed and that there is no better way to start to do this than via a Municipal Bank. It is sometimes asserted that such a move should be opposed because competition from a publicly owned bank would be unfair to the rest. But an effect on the rest is precisely what is needed and long overdue. The rest have not been afraid to be unfair to the public.
Creeping cartelisation is also a feature of other so-called competitive industries - witness the power companies and their outrageous leapfrogging price hikes. Regulators range from inadequate to useless, and toothless consumer groups are simply ignored. Unmitigated ‘competition’, meaning little more than a profit-grabbing free-for-all, is past its sell by date.
Going beyond banks, if such sectors had a publicly owned firm acting as an exemplar, treating people in a fair, respectful, honest and straightforward fashion this would introduce competition that is socially worthwhile. It would offer security and fairness to ordinary people, presently abused by commercial predators pedalling complex and confusing ‘products’ designed to deceive. Commerce should not be a morality free zone, nor need it be if there was confident, principled intervention.