Royal Bank of Scotland — House of Commons, 2015-11-05
Topic: Domestic Commerce
Clive Anthony Lewis (Labour, Centre-left): I thank the hon. Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb) for his detailed analysis, and I thank other Government Members for their progressive contributions to today’s debate, some of which have been quite surprising from the perspective of Opposition Members. I would also like to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) for introducing the debate and for her thorough speech. In fact, it was so thorough that she has left me only slim pickings for my own speech I want us to take a step back and remind ourselves of the bigger picture of the role RBS plays and has played in our financial system, and of just how high the stakes are when it comes to sorting out our banking system. Let us not forget why we own RBS in the first place. This is the bank whose reckless profiteering and pursuit of growth at any cost brought the UK economy to its knees—a bank that in 2009 made the biggest loss in UK corporate history and taxpayers paid a high price for its hubris; a bank whose ill-fated takeover of ABN AMRO has become a byword for corporate over-reaching, and whose former chief executive officer, Fred "the Shred" Goodwin, has become a byword for greed and irresponsibility. It is somewhat ironic that the poster child for the failings of privately owned banks has now become the poster child for the Government’s ideological insistence that banks are better run in the private sector. This bank’s own track record hardly bears out that assertion The Government would have us believe that there is no real alternative to reprivatisation, and that anyone who says otherwise is a 1970s throwback who simply wants to keep RBS in its current form forever, but, as we have heard from other Members today, there are plenty of alternatives. As my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton so eloquently argued, keeping RBS in public hands does not have to mean running it all from Whitehall. It could mean transforming it into a network of local banks, accountable to their local communities—banks run in the public interest and not in the interest of a narrow few; banks that simply do not engage in the kind of speculative and risky activities that caused the global financial crisis in the first place, but instead are mandated to stick to their core social function of providing capital for sound businesses and providing banking services for local people Whether we look overseas at the thriving local public interest banks in countries such as Germany, Switzerland and Japan, or closer to home at the proposals of "firebrand radicals" such as Nigel Lawson, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Virgin Money, there is no shortage of ideas when it comes to the structural reform of RBS. What is lacking is the political will on the Government Benches for serious change. Indeed, the most worrying aspect of the Government’s attitude to RBS is the broader direction of travel that it represents. We are essentially being told, "Move along now. There is nothing to see here. We have fixed the problems that led to the crisis, and it can never happen again. It is safe to return to business as usual." That was evident from the manner in which the sale of RBS was announced.