The FT has reported:
Nick Clegg wants to give every British voter shares in the state-owned banks as the deputy prime minister looks to revive his battered image by creating a “people's banking system”.
Mr Clegg told the Financial Times he had written to George Osborne and Danny Alexander at the Treasury this week, asking them to look into introducing a “mass share-ownership scheme” as part of the privatisation of Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group.
“Psychologically it is immensely important that the British public feel they have not just been overlooked and ignored,” Mr Clegg said from Rio de Janeiro, where he is on a two-day trade trip.
“Their money has been used to the tune of billions to keep the British banking system on a life support system and they have absolutely no say at all in what happens when normality is restored.”
He added: “I think in a sense as a society we are condemned to take an interest in our banking system.”
This idea is bad enough to be called bananas.
For the record: I'm all in favour of mutualisation. It is what should happen at Northern Rock.
And I'm all in favour of nationalisation - which is what should happen at RBS so it can become the Royal Bank of Sustainability and be at the core of economic regeneration in this country. It could also then partner such essential projects as the Post Bank which will open access to banking to more people in this country and could be used as the mechanism to end the curse of doorstep lending.
But Clegg's not proposing either of those things. Hes proposing giving shares away. Who to, I wonder? Direct taxpayers? That's about half the country. Those on the electoral roll ? Millions aren't on that? Those who apply? We know that many would not?
And isn't he aware that such schemes have rise to the concentration of power in the hands of the oligarchs in Russia?
And maybe also he should be aware that a company with a massively diverse shareholder base, none of whom vote because none of whom think they have any influence, is susceptible to control by a small minority of shareholders who can capture a block of shares at modest cost?
And therein I think lies his plan: this is about letting a minority have control at remarkably little cost whilst they exploit the state that will have given them that opportunity and the rest of us who would be taken for a ride.
That's modern liberalism for you - capturing the state for private benefit and this plan is a classic of that type of exercise.
You can either think Clegg has really lost his marbles on this one - or it is a 'cunning plan' to achieve his ultimate goal of control of the state by a minority. I suspect it's the latter. Either way it's unacceptable. These banks need strong control in the interests of society - not least because the chance of another bailout being needed soon is very high. That's nationalisation - not this cock-eyed mechanism for delivering minority control for an elite.
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While I don’t agree with his idea, to call it “bananas” is sadly just jumping on the fashionable Clegg bashing band wagon.
I welcome any politician trying to come up with something different, but at the moment it’s all just window dressing. They are all desperately trying to come up with a way of creating a new bubble for short term gains, in a package that the daily mail reading peons don’t baulk at.
I’m not sure nationalisation is the answer either. If we can’t even trust the government to run the NHS properly, there’s not much hope for a multi-national bank, with a bigger balance sheet than our GDP.
After the great depression in America, the banks were tightly regulated, and worked as they should. We are experiencing the aftershocks of the death of Reganomics, and this is the best chance we have of reforming our entire banking system. It won’t happen though, because politicians have become more adept at stage-managing crises than actually creating sustainable policies.
There’s a growing view in the younger generation, that the baby-boomers have spent their inheritance. You can see where they’re coming from too, one of the only things that George Obsborne increased spending on was pensions. The rest of us are faced with retiring later and and no optimism about the future.
In the end though, there isn’t one politician who is willing to put their head above the parapet, at the risk of being kicked off the gravy train, and actually acknowledge the elephant in the room.
Back to the inevitable boom and bust cycle, the short-termism, the ever increasing gap in wealth between rich and poor, the endless bickering over minutiae while the emperor gleefully prances around in his birthday suit.
I don’t agree we can’t trust the government with the NHS
We can’t trust the Toreis with it because they want to destroy it
but it is possible to have governments who can be trusted with such things
We can trust the Tories and LibDems to want to privatise it, and we can trust Labour to pour massive amount of our money in and make it more bureaucratic inefficient. It’s a no win situation
@AndyM
“we can trust Labour to pour massive amount of our money in and make it more bureaucratic inefficient”
And you don’t think the ConDem reorganisation is going to require an new layer of bureaucracy?