We don’t yet know what the effect of this week’s financial crisis on living standards will be. At the moment, the worst hit are those who want or need to sell their home to buy a smaller one, but it is hardly likely to stop there. It seems that our “progressive” politicians don’t have any depth of ideas on which to draw to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. They desperately want to put Humpty back on his wall, but this time he’ll need a rather broader platform if he isn’t going to fall off again.

Those of us who equate our happiness to the prospect of increased material wealth are going to be disappointed, and politicians who set out their stall on that basis – as they all have for as long as any of us can remember – are going to find it tough going, too. Ironically, it seems that Cameron has a better understanding of this than most. Brown is probably relieved that he’s being called on to deal with the financial sector again – his Presbyterian inheritance is of little help to him in developing creative responses to the social responsibility of government – to find a way to interlace community with individual freedom.

Yet the financial crisis does provides an unique opportunity to do just that. We need banks, and since we need them, we need loveable banks. And the first banker to realise this is going to do very well, assuming – as I suppose we must – that the banking system is going to get through this.

What would a loveable bank look like? Its products would be simple, and easy to understand. It would, for example, express risk not in terms of adjectives or mumbo-jumbo letters and arithmetical symbols, but as the simple likelihood of a product going belly-up. It would provide tools so that its customers could get into the habit of financial planning and control every bit as comprehensive as its own. It would provide periodic face-to-face financial health-checks for its customers. It would be driven not by greed but by professional pride. It would not be particularly entrepreneurial, instead seeing its role as that of enabling entrepreneurship in others.

Such a bank would probably not be listed on the Stock Exchange, although it would undoubtedly use the money markets, particularly for short-term dealing, as banks do now.

If all this sounds much like the old mutual Building Society – or even Credit Union – brought up to date, it’s intended to. We need a major mutual player to keep the others, if not exactly loveable themselves, at least honest. And of course, the government – by buying all those bank shares – now has a wonderful opportunity to make it happen. It should encourage one of the clearers – whichever is the weakest – to re-organise itself as a ‘loveable’ bank, specialising in the personal and small business sectors. Its shareholders could be compensated, over time, from the proceeds of the sale of the government’s interest in the others. And if they can’t wait for their money, that’s what markets are for: to buy debt (don’t we just know it…).

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