Give us boring banks that keep our money safe

The difficulty with banks is that they are simultaneously the safest and the least safe places in civilisation. Almost all of us put money into them, because we trust them.

Yet that trust is extremely fragile. In modern times, with social media, it has become more so, as we see this week with the fate of Credit Suisse. If someone suspects something is wrong, that suspicion can quickly spread.

In the film Mary Poppins, young Michael Banks wants his money to “feed the birds” (tuppence a bag), but Mr Dawes, the elderly boss of Dawes, Tomes, Mousely, Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank, grabs the pennies. There, he sings, they will be “safe and sound./ Soon that tuppence safely invested in the bank/ will become a pound”.

“While stand the banks of England, England stands,” Mr Dawes exclaims, and then totters. “When fall the banks of England, England falls.” At which point, he falls, until caught by colleagues.

Young Michael wants his tuppence for the birds, shouts “Give it back!” and grabs it from the old man’s hand. Ladies in the banking hall hear his cry with alarm and soon all the customers are trying to get their money out. A bank run begins. All payments are stopped. Little Michael, his sister and his tuppence escape between the legs of the frightened depositors.

For quite a long time now, we have been aware that Mr Dawes was right about the relationship between our banks and our national stability; but our leaders have not been able to work out how that stability is assured. Banks have become altogether too exciting.

Is it too late to devise a big boring bank which we really can trust? There must be millions of account holders and tens of thousands of small businesses much more concerned that their money is safe than that it is growing fast. Perhaps that suggestion is too simple to attract expert interest.

Keeping the Elgin Marbles

In this paper yesterday, Sir Noel Malcolm set out why the case for sending the Elgin Marbles back from the British Museum to Greece is wrong. With his unique learning and lucidity, his new Policy Exchange pamphlet shows that the legal, cultural and historical basis for the claim is false.

I have nothing to add to Sir Noel’s exposition, except to say that I wish the people who run our great cultural institutions were equally robust and well-informed.

The great problem about woke attacks on our culture is not so much the full-on wokeists themselves. At any one time, there will always be significant numbers of people who wish to destroy our beloved institutions. There were, after all, far more active Communists (including actual traitors) in Britain in 1950 than there are today.

No, the problem is the weakness of those in charge – the timorousness of senior academics when colleagues are “cancelled”; the feeble ignorance which allowed the National Trust leadership to persuade itself that its Interim Report on slavery and “colonialism” links with some of its properties was a proper piece of research; the BBC’s capitulation after the row over Gary Lineker’s tweet.

The British Museum suffers from this disease. Quickly following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, its director, Hartwig Fischer, tweeted “The British Museum stands in solidarity with…the black community throughout the world. We are aligned with the spirit and soul of Black Lives Matter everywhere.”

Did Dr Fischer know that Black Lives Matter (BLM) is arguably a racist organisation, in that it attacks “whiteness” and various “white” sins? Why did he assume BLM represented black people’s views universally? Above all, why did he think that police behaviour in the United States, however horrendous, had anything to do with his museum? Dr Fischer still occupies his directorship today, still abject in the face of cultural attack from within and without.

The British Museum’s chairman, George Osborne, is a wilier and tougher operator; but even he – whose besetting fault is over-ingenuity – is trying to solve the Elgin Marbles “problem” by seeking clever swaps of objects with Greece, an exchange of cultural hostages.

All this is unnecessary. The museum has been, for 200 years, the best repository the marbles have had since centuries before Christ. It owns and cares for them. It should keep them. Behind many decades of wrangling, the issue is as simple as that.

The nationalisation of land

Last week, the little-known Dutch Farmer-citizen party (BBB) suddenly swept to electoral success. Its single most popular issue was its opposition to net-zero-driven nitrogen emission reductions, such emissions being essential to the farming which is a leading part of the Dutch economy. The policy also involves the state taking over lots of small Dutch farms.

There is a message for us here. As the latest IPCC report in effect admits, the arbitrarily selected overall target of net-zero emissions by 2050 cannot be achieved in that time, but politicians feel they cannot acknowledge this. So they press on, piling unnecessary burdens on many productive sectors of the economy and on citizens, hoping the odium will fall on their successors. In a densely populated country like Britain, the nationalisation of land – in effect if not in name – is being pushed as our contribution to saving the planet by cutting production.

This discreditable gamble will not last much longer because voters are beginning to spot it. If mainstream parties do not address it, “populist” ones will, creating mayhem.