Tony Shearer is the former chief executive of Singer & Friedlander. It’s up to you whether you consider that a recommendation or not. What I do know is that he wrote a very good article in the Observer yesterday. He said:

On 25 February the chairman of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) admitted that it had failed over the previous decade. Lord Turner also said that the requirement that a person running a bank should be a "fit and proper person" had been interpreted by the FSA as meaning anyone not convicted of fraud. … The consequences are huge.

But then he notes:

The FSA, the Bank of England, UK Financial Investments and the Treasury are supposed to be learning the lessons and changing the system so nothing similar can ever happen again. Lord Turner is an ex-investment banker (from Merrill Lynch); Hector Sants (CEO of the FSA) is an ex-investment banker from Credit Suisse First Boston; and the FSA's new chief operating officer is also from Credit Suisse First Boston.

UK Financial Investments is the government-owned company set up to hold our shares in the failed banks. The non-executives on its board are ex-investment bankers. Glen Moreno, the acting chairman (who plans to step down due to his involvement with a trust with problems relating to tax avoidance) is ex-Citigroup, and the other non-executives are Peter Gibbs (ex-Merrill Lynch), Lucinda Riches (ex-UBS), Michael Kirkwood (ex-Citigroup), Philip Remnant (senior adviser to Credit Suisse) and Louise Tulett (Treasury).

The chief executive, John Kingman, the only executive director, was previously the Treasury official who chaired the joint FSA, Bank of England and Treasury committee set up in 1997 to regulate the stability of the markets. It has failed in the most spectacular and costly way possible. The executive who deals day-to-day with the banks is ex-Merrill Lynch, and the banking analyst ex-Credit Suisse First Boston.

One might expect that the number of ex-Merrill Lynch people would indicate that Merrill Lynch was a sound, well-run company with an appropriate culture. But like most investment banks, its business included packaging and distributing the toxic debts that are at the centre of the failures. Last year, it had to be rescued from collapse.

And his argument is simple: how can we trust the future regulation of banking to bankers? They have failed already. Their mind set is wrong. They need to be a part of the process, of course, but all of it? No way.

We really must move on. Now is the time for independent thinkers to be heavily engaged in this process.

Max Hastings (no weak hearted liberal) has a warning as to the consequences of failing to do so in the Guardian today:

Today …few people even in Wall Street or the City of London dispute that we are suffering a historic failure. It cannot be blamed on political troublemakers, workers, asylum-seekers, terrorists or climate change. It is explicitly the responsibility of those who have conducted the world's financial machinery, indulged and abetted by governments.

As he says:

In the face of this, the innocents who will suffer seem entitled to vent their feelings, armed with a moral authority a hundred times greater than that which provoked the turbulence of the miners' strike or, for that matter, the poll tax riots. To say this is not to countenance violence, but merely to acknowledge the justice of public anger.

It will be strange if, in a new and poorer world, voices of the left do not find audiences such as they have not known for 30 years. As public spending is cut, the jobless find it impossible to regain work, businesses of all kinds struggle for survival, the political map of many nations, notably including Britain, could be redrawn. In the decade ahead, no one will speak without irony of "the enterprise society".

He then goes on to discuss the problems this creates for the Conservative Party. It is though a bigger issue than that, He says:

Thus far, what seems most remarkable about the cataclysm is that few prophets have acknowledged how radically it could change the political landscape. It remains possible that the measures now being contemplated by the G20 will suffice to restore stability.

When the phoney war ends and the consequence of the credit crunch make themselves fully felt in peoples' homes, popular belief in market capitalism will have suffered permanent damage. There is speculation about a rise of rightwing extremism. But it will be even more surprising if a new left does not sooner or later present a challenge for power in Britain and other democracies.

As he puts it:

I say this not in a belief that such a movement will deserve to succeed, but in the hope that the defenders of capitalism will come up with vastly better explanations than they have so far about why the market will remain the least bad arbiter of advanced societies.

The Tories are in no need of arguments to enable them to win an election. Gordon Brown provides those. They face the vastly more difficult task, shared by almost every political party in the western democracies, of thereafter producing a new model of capitalism that embittered electorates will acquiesce in. If Cameron and George Osborne find themselves leading Britain's G20 delegation next year, it is hard to believe that they will find the experience any more profitable than do Brown and Alistair Darling.

This is what engages me now. It is what the leaders at the G20 need to have in mind.

If Gordon Brown says that Switzerland’s incredibly weak undertakings on banking secrecy are enough to save it from sanctions people will realise nothing is going to change. It will be the same with tax havens in general. Some argue the noise about them is irrelevant. That’s wrong. The noise about them is entirely appropriate.

Secrecy jurisdictions are the way in which banks avoided regulation. They will continue to be the way in which banks avoid regulation unless they are, as Gordon Brown demanded, outlawed. People know that. They want change. Change here is the best symbol that can be given of progress.

It has to happen. A failure to deliver would be very, very worrying indeed.