Banking On It

Those of you who said that it was impossible to separate retail banking from investment banking, take it up, not only with every mutual building society by law, but also, as of today, with the next Prime Minister and with the next Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Thanks to those much-maligned figures, the conservative Democrats such as Glass and Steagall, that separation existed in America throughout the period that she first rose to and then occupied global economic pre-eminence.

That Glass-Stegall was repealed by Bill Clinton gives the lie to the claim usually made about the position on either the wider American, or the internal Democratic, spectrum occupied by him and by his wife.

Even George Osborne has promised that the public stakes in banks would be used to vote down eye-watering bonuses and the like, a broken commitment on which he needs to be called out loudly and often.

The stage is set to entrench our own Glass-Steagall yet further by legislating for the whole of retail banking, apart from those public stakes, to be turned into a network of mutual building societies, ironclad as such by the Statute Law.

The same Statute Law by which mutual building societies have always been required to observe an absolute separation between their own retail banking and the far riskier practice of investment banking.

Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, over to you.