A new culture needed

I have just been listening to a Spanish woman interviewed by a reporter on the Radio 4 Today news programme.  She was a demonstrator in Madrid this week. She said -

'The banks are to blame. The politicians are just their puppets.' The reporter was puzzled though. He wondered aloud why the Spanish marchers had posters protesting at the City of London and the laissez-faire of the Bank of England.

Just after that item, came news about a report on the latest 'scandal' in the City of London - when all the top bankers fiddled the Libor Rate for personal and for institutional gain.

'Maybe it is already illegal' opined the business correspondent, commenting on the proposal from a new report - that the banker's vast fraud, involving setting false interest rates for £3 Trillion's worth of business across the globe, should be dealt with by passing a new law against this sort of crime.

'What actually has to be done,' the correspondent went on in an insider tone 'is to change the banking culture.'

No messy court cases and prison sentences then. Just a return to the golden days when a banker's word was his bond.

Hang on a minute.

Most of the top notch bankers went to Eton, Harrow, Westminster, St Paul's public schools, like their dads. Most of them ended up at Oxbridge. A few had the luck to join Cameron and Osborne in the Bullendon Club, throwing bread rolls at waiters. You don't get more culture than that in today's Britain. These aren't ill-bred Russian squillionaires who bullied and robbed their way to power and money. Their great, great, great grandfathers did all that. No. This is as good as it gets, culture wise. Yet it turns out that even this elite, even these young Adonises, suckled by their silver spoons, are grubby, vicious, greedy, money loving liars and thieves. The had all the 'culture' - and privileges and insider leg-ups going. Look what they did with it.

For culture; for profound understanding coupled with the expression of simple truth and the courage and moral strength to back it up in her real life, the anonymous Spanish woman has it all.