I’d like to say a few brief words in defence of bankers. Not a popular pursuit at present, I understand, but it strikes me that the British media and public are currently embarked upon a witch hunt intended to obscure the real truth of the current economic crisis - namely that we all, individually, have been too greedy, and too willing to borrow other people’s money. We can’t separate our economic institutions from the rest of our lives in the way one can an enemy in war time. Yet it seems apparent that, at the present moment, we are turning the banking system and those who work in it into the modern equivalent of Social Democracy in 1930s and 40s Germany. The bankers aren’t, however, an enemy to be vanquished. We can only get through this crisis if we begin to look inward, and stop laying the blame at the most convenient door.

Tags: banking crisis, fred goodwin, public reaction, pension