Nope.

I don't think most people – whether nominally left wing or right wing – are too bothered about free markets. Anybody in his right mind knows that governments trample on the notion of free markets all the time (and that they use taxpayers' money to bail out banks and prop up house prices) and hand out a small part of the spoils to special interest groups, i.e. homeowners think they are getting a good deal because the value of their houses are going up.

Great to see you the other night at the film and Q&A. Thanks for the clarifying post. I take your point about the power of teh government to give the bank whatever it needed to make up for money taken out by depositors. BUT do you not think that such a situation achieves almost the desired effect in that it forces the governmetn to be seen to be using tax money to twart the will of the 'free amrket'?

I cannot help (and maybe I'm just too hopeful by far) but think that to provoke such a stand off would do the job in itself.

What do you think?

I have seen similar pressures on people at work and the incredible thing I think is how far it can spin out to other staff members/stakeholders and then out of control just from that one step taken by one person in 'management'.
But I don't think it is just within employment that these decisions happen. I think most of us guilty of putting consumption/material wealth above pretty much all other values when we shop too.
I don't think those decision are just about what we decide to do – but about what we decide to ignore – aren't we all really a bit sociopathic in our consumption habits? We might not personally make the decision which are truly sociopathic, but when we know they have been taken aren't we just as sociopathic in deciding to ignore it./support it with our hardearned cash?
As employees and as consumers we tend to shrug our shoulders and say 'what can I do, I don't make the rules, I can't change anything all by myself? We let immediate concerns (those in the here and now. concerning our nearest & dearest) outweigh everything else.
Many of us would put our child's desire to have the toy they crave above any ethical considerations about how that toy was made. We shut our minds to stories of child labour being used by factories making Disney products and focus only on the fact that our daughter/niece/godchild will beam the cutest smile when she gets that Disney princess whatever. And similarly in another 'reality' the risk manager wanting his child to keep up with her peers knows that he's going to need his salary if little Tamara is going to go to that expensive private school with all her bestest friends. So faced with the decision of integrity vs his job security he tells himself he's only being a good father, reads a handy newspaper article decrying state schools to bolster his stance and chooses.. job security.
I'm pretty sure the textile worker working unpaid overtime because some stripey top HAS to be on the High Street shelves by Monday probably thinks much the same way about the average Western consumer as we do about the financial oligarchs.
But as we have done with the people in the third world the financial oligarch tells himself that our poverty renders us slightly less human than him, that we can't possibly have the complex yet crystal clear needs and desires he experiences because we're surely blunted by all that muck and ordinariness.

SO while I'm all for having the entire staff of Goldman Sachs and most of the central bankers in Europe hung drawn and quatered I don't think we can call for that without taking a good hard look at own ourselves. If we try to build a better world for oursleves on a stinking pile of hypocrisy we end up as – 'Merica i.e utterly schizo

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An attempt by Barclays to suppress details of its allegedly massive tax avoidance schemes two years ago ended in farce. The high street bank went to court in the middle of the night to gag the Guardian but was outmanoeuvred by free-spirited souls on the internet.

It showed the legal system struggling to keep documents secret even after they were freely available on the web.

The story emerged in March 2009 when a whistleblower leaked internal Barclays memos to the Liberal Democrat MP Vince Cable.

The memos – passed on to the newspaper – described how a 2007 scheme called Project Knight proposed to save tax by manipulating loans totalling more than $16bn (£9.8bn), through a web of firms in the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg and the United States.

The memos also quoted advice from lawyers on how to blunt any challenges from HM Revenue & Customs. The whistleblower alleged: "It is a commonly held view that no agency in the US or the UK has the resources or the commitment to challenge [Barclays]."

Freshfields, Barclays' lawyers, toiled into the night to compel the Guardian to remove the documents from the website. Geraldine Proudler, a solicitor acting for the Guardian, was woken by a high court judge telephoning at 2am and asked to justify their publication. At 2.31am, Mr Justice Ouseley, over the phone, ordered that the documents be removed from the website, by which time 127 people had read them.

Later that day, Barclays went to court to argue that the documents should be permanently removed, accusing the Guardian of "vigilante journalism" by publishing the documents to "the entire country" rather than merely to regulators.

The Guardian documents disclosed seven tax avoidance schemes operated by Barclays. Many of them were devised by structured capital markets boss Michael Keeley. They involved more than £20bn of loans typically shuttled between entities in Luxembourg and the Caymans, designed to generate hundreds of millions of pounds of tax reliefs, the proceeds frequently shared with US banks.."

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Dastards !

I also really enjoyed the talk yesterday. The comments I heard from people as they left the cinema while I loitered outside smoking were very positive too. Well done. Hope the others go just as well.

The Depositor's Union idea is great. However, it occured to me on the way home that the government would probably legislate to outlaw such organisations pretty swiftly if they ever came into being. I don't know much about the law but I imagine they could come up some kind of special circumstances style bill to nip the idea in the bud before it gained enough momentum. They'd do it under the guise of protecting the economy from another banking crisis and there'd be very little opposition in parliament.

Maybe I'm talking rubbish but I see intent in the plans to 'reform' Westminster. I think it represents the completion of the project to hijack parliamentary democracy. All you hear about in the mainstream media is the change to the voting system and almost nothing about the plans to reduce by 50 the number of MPs sitting in the Commons. The number of MPs hasn't been that low since 1800 when the number was 558 corresponding to one MP for roughly every 18,800 people. If the number of MPs sitting now was 600 there would be on average 103,000 people represented by each MP.

The reduction in the number of Members is calculated in my opinion to reduce representation at parliament and make it easier to pass the laws demanded by the elite. Those laws will inevitably be designed to protect the wealth that was sucked up during the bubble by ensuring that we pay off the resultant debts with our taxes and our national assets. They'll be designed to turn the UK into the same kind of haven for corrupt banking and low-tax corporate HQing that Ireland was. All in the name of making the UK more 'competitive' but really just to rinse us of our last pennies and last traces of self-respect.

The race to the bottom has begun. The lawmakers will keep us on that path indefinitely unless we have our own 'Cairo moment'. In my opinion it should be our objective to find ways to make that happen as soon as possible.

I haven't read Affluenza, Princesschipchops, but I'm quite ready to back the author's hypothesis about a lot of top bankers and traders being sociopaths. In fact I'd go as far as to say it's a requisite for many of those jobs.