The philosopher in me has been reflecting on bankers.
I first came across the problem that bankers and banking represent as a mature student, I was over twenty one and over drawn, nothing new there you might say, so the Bank wrote to my father and asked him to pay down the overdraft.
My father reacted in his own inimitable way and so I was called into the Bank.
I can't recall the actual conversation in any detail but the gist of it was that I was a delinquent customer and should consider making a new arrangement with another bank.
Which I did.
But that was then, now I would have been offered a new loan to pay off the old loan, a new credit card, although they hadn't actually been invented then , that was a year or two later, and probably been given the new facility on deferred terms, with capital only being repaid after my pension became payable.
In the bible usury is condemned, lending money to pay off debts is seen as a way of reinforcing indebtedness rather than, as much credit card advertising suggests, lifting the burden. Only the other biblical concept of Jubilee achieves that.
Debt is after all the most effective form of social control there is.
Over my lifetime I have banked with Williams Glyn's now defunct, Nat West, and The Midland. I now have two accounts which handily doubles the overdraft facility!
When I was working in Birmingham in the late eighties, I did some work on Banking (theology and the economy) and I recall one junior official from a High Street Bank calling me to complain that when he started out with his Bank he was undertaking a traditional role as a Bank Manager, which he enjoyed, meeting people, advising people, becoming friends with his customers and fulfilling a role as a reliable friend in times of need or crisis .
His role was largely advising his customers, offering facilities when they were required, monitoring the customers management of their accounts and generally ensuring that his customers remained solvent and were able to live comfortably and save a little for the inevitable rainy day.
But even though he was younger than me and had not been working for the Bank that long, his role had changed. Now he was under huge pressure to sell 'products', there were essentially two kinds of products insurances and loans.
So if a customer came into the Bank to discuss his financial needs or undertake an exercise in financial planning he was required to sell these products and effectively tempt his customers into borrowing and spending more than, in most cases, they could afford.
This change in role disturbed him and he was beginning to look at a change of career. But what does an ex banker do? Join a Rock and Roll Band?
How have bankers contributed to the Big Society?
Some of them have of course benefited personally and enormously, with huge bonuses, and all the trappings of personal financial success from mansions to fine cars and luxurious lifestyles reflected in the their bigger share of the big society cake.
But they have also brought UK plc to the verge of a major financial catastrophe.
Of course the coalitions' narrative says that it was the previous Labour Government that presided over a major overspend, reducing the country practically to bankruptcy, resulting in the necessity to see the deficit driven down by unprecedented cuts in public expenditure.
Any attempt to bring the banks under some form of control or to draw them into the proposed culture of conservative social responsibility presumably as opposed to 'socialist irresponsibility'? Has been met with the threat of withdrawal, the excellent folk who got us into this fine mess will move abroad in search of the rewards that their talents deserve?
We won't be able to hire the staff if we don't pay the salaries they demand and they will leave and work for our competitors.
If that is so there are going to be thousands possibly millions of folk looking for work by the end of this year, so advertise, recruit, who knows, I am yet to be convinced of the so called brilliance of these guys.
I have seen their work at quarters rather too close for comfort and was hugely unimpressed.
One senior banker recently commented that, now the crisis was over, we should all get over ourselves and let them get on with making money.
Well that would be fine if we got to enjoy some of it or if some of it found its way round the economic loop and actually passed however briefly through our wallets, but it never does.
So what has all this got do with philosophy or the big society?
As a student at Durham in the sixties I was told about an exam question that was set in the Philosophy examination.
The question was: Why?
Various attempts at an answer were made but the highest marks were given to a student who had answered:
Why Not?
Given the current disastrous track record of the banks from Northern Rock to RBS both of which are effectively state owned, why not create a new model of mutual banking? Why not allow those Banks which threaten to leave do exactly that? Why not create a National Investment Bank operated on a not for profit basis. Why not just re-invent financial services in a way that means they are there to help and support people to go about their daily business, buy goods and services, invest in Businesses and realise their dreams? The co-operative model here has much to commend it from ethical investment to savers and borrowers having a stake in the business.
In John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath the Bank Manager who arrives to call in the farm loan and make the man who has been both a neighbour and friend not only loses his living but his home, apologises, with the words 'it's not personal it's the Bank'.
Maybe for the many thousands who have been made homeless or redundant in the current financial crisis such a response is simply not adequate. The Bank is not a force of nature, an earthquake or a Tsunami it is a human institution, run by human beings, many of whom feel thoroughly compromised by the role they play and by many others who should ......
I first came across the problem that bankers and banking represent as a mature student, I was over twenty one and over drawn, nothing new there you might say, so the Bank wrote to my father and asked him to pay down the overdraft.
My father reacted in his own inimitable way and so I was called into the Bank.
I can't recall the actual conversation in any detail but the gist of it was that I was a delinquent customer and should consider making a new arrangement with another bank.
Which I did.
But that was then, now I would have been offered a new loan to pay off the old loan, a new credit card, although they hadn't actually been invented then , that was a year or two later, and probably been given the new facility on deferred terms, with capital only being repaid after my pension became payable.
In the bible usury is condemned, lending money to pay off debts is seen as a way of reinforcing indebtedness rather than, as much credit card advertising suggests, lifting the burden. Only the other biblical concept of Jubilee achieves that.
Debt is after all the most effective form of social control there is.
Over my lifetime I have banked with Williams Glyn's now defunct, Nat West, and The Midland. I now have two accounts which handily doubles the overdraft facility!
When I was working in Birmingham in the late eighties, I did some work on Banking (theology and the economy) and I recall one junior official from a High Street Bank calling me to complain that when he started out with his Bank he was undertaking a traditional role as a Bank Manager, which he enjoyed, meeting people, advising people, becoming friends with his customers and fulfilling a role as a reliable friend in times of need or crisis .
His role was largely advising his customers, offering facilities when they were required, monitoring the customers management of their accounts and generally ensuring that his customers remained solvent and were able to live comfortably and save a little for the inevitable rainy day.
But even though he was younger than me and had not been working for the Bank that long, his role had changed. Now he was under huge pressure to sell 'products', there were essentially two kinds of products insurances and loans.
So if a customer came into the Bank to discuss his financial needs or undertake an exercise in financial planning he was required to sell these products and effectively tempt his customers into borrowing and spending more than, in most cases, they could afford.
This change in role disturbed him and he was beginning to look at a change of career. But what does an ex banker do? Join a Rock and Roll Band?
How have bankers contributed to the Big Society?
Some of them have of course benefited personally and enormously, with huge bonuses, and all the trappings of personal financial success from mansions to fine cars and luxurious lifestyles reflected in the their bigger share of the big society cake.
But they have also brought UK plc to the verge of a major financial catastrophe.
Of course the coalitions' narrative says that it was the previous Labour Government that presided over a major overspend, reducing the country practically to bankruptcy, resulting in the necessity to see the deficit driven down by unprecedented cuts in public expenditure.
Any attempt to bring the banks under some form of control or to draw them into the proposed culture of conservative social responsibility presumably as opposed to 'socialist irresponsibility'? Has been met with the threat of withdrawal, the excellent folk who got us into this fine mess will move abroad in search of the rewards that their talents deserve?
We won't be able to hire the staff if we don't pay the salaries they demand and they will leave and work for our competitors.
If that is so there are going to be thousands possibly millions of folk looking for work by the end of this year, so advertise, recruit, who knows, I am yet to be convinced of the so called brilliance of these guys.
I have seen their work at quarters rather too close for comfort and was hugely unimpressed.
One senior banker recently commented that, now the crisis was over, we should all get over ourselves and let them get on with making money.
Well that would be fine if we got to enjoy some of it or if some of it found its way round the economic loop and actually passed however briefly through our wallets, but it never does.
So what has all this got do with philosophy or the big society?
As a student at Durham in the sixties I was told about an exam question that was set in the Philosophy examination.
The question was: Why?
Various attempts at an answer were made but the highest marks were given to a student who had answered:
Why Not?
Given the current disastrous track record of the banks from Northern Rock to RBS both of which are effectively state owned, why not create a new model of mutual banking? Why not allow those Banks which threaten to leave do exactly that? Why not create a National Investment Bank operated on a not for profit basis. Why not just re-invent financial services in a way that means they are there to help and support people to go about their daily business, buy goods and services, invest in Businesses and realise their dreams? The co-operative model here has much to commend it from ethical investment to savers and borrowers having a stake in the business.
In John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath the Bank Manager who arrives to call in the farm loan and make the man who has been both a neighbour and friend not only loses his living but his home, apologises, with the words 'it's not personal it's the Bank'.
Maybe for the many thousands who have been made homeless or redundant in the current financial crisis such a response is simply not adequate. The Bank is not a force of nature, an earthquake or a Tsunami it is a human institution, run by human beings, many of whom feel thoroughly compromised by the role they play and by many others who should ......
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