Sometimes, The Feeling Is Not Mutual

There is no point to the "Nudge Unit", anyway.

Unless the TSB really is to be reconstituted with its Trustees appointed by the Church of Scotland, the Methodist Church, the United Reformed Church and the Baptist Union, then all retail banks other than the public stakes in HBOS and RBS ought to be turned into mutual building societies.

All except the TSB and those stakes certainly ought to be, with the profits from those stakes distributed equally among all households in the United Kingdom. Mutual building societies are already prevented by the Statute Law from engaging in investment banking rather than in retail banking, a combination which must also be banned by Statute across the board.

But mutualisation, even to those of us who believe profoundly in this country's gloriously diverse manifestations of mutual ownership (it is very British), is not appropriate at all for, to cite some of the examples that are currently doing the rounds, the postal service, or the railways, or the utilities. Nor for a division of the Cabinet Office.

Those belong in public ownership. Accept nothing else.