There should be no sympathy for the treatment meted out to Mr Fred Goodwin. Through a combination of vanity, greed and sheer incompetence, he presided over the biggest banking disaster in British history, to the great cost of the taxpayer and the British economy, and showed no practical contrition for having done so. The fact that his behaviour was simply the most egregious example of a culpability shared by many other bankers is neither here nor there. There are occasions when an example needs to be set, and this is one of them.
But the RBS disaster, and the excesses of the bonus culture in general, are symptoms of a complex cancer at the heart of modern banking. It is dealing with this disease, rather than its symptoms, that needs to be the focus of policy.
It is three years now since, writing in this newspaper’s Future of Capitalism series, I called for a new Glass-Steagall Act – a complete separation between classic commercial banking and investment banking. I am glad that the Vickers Committee came to a similar conclusion about the dangers of so-called universal banking, and that it recommended at least a considerable degree of separation with the imposition of the so-called ring fence between the two; and that the government has accepted the Vickers recommendations and will be introducing the necessary legislation.