Transcript of Thought For the World's thought for the day

Mark Thomas

11th February 2009

In my new stand up show, I asked the audience to help me create a manifesto of policy ideas, things that will help us improve our lives. Now these suggestions can be serious or silly. Some suggest nationalization of the railways or a massive program to build council houses. Others suggest we confuse daily mail readers by telling them that John Lewis's is a co-op or that asylum seekers are the natural predators of peadophiles.

But above all else, it is the blood lust for bankers that is upon us. "Hang a banker every day of the year," screamed one manifesto suggestion from Bath, followed up by, "And introduce compulsory allotments," which seemed fantastically British, caring for plants, borders, and vegetables while demanding capital punishment.

There seemed to be no limit to the extent of this form of fantasy revenge. "We should take over the Countryside Alliance and hunt bankers," said one. Another suggested, "Bring back public stoning for hedge fund managers," which alarmingly suggests that this has been tried before.

But standing in the Treasury Select Committee hearing today, I felt a tiny glimmer of pity. Not for the bankers who lined up like a bizarre edition of the X-files, the ex-CEO, the ex-chairman, and especially not for Sir Fred Goodwin of RBS, who has become nothing but a benchmark for failure.

Because no matter what we do, none of us will ever do anything so drastically wrong that we require 37 billion of public money to sort it out.

No, I felt sorry for us, because what we seemed to demand more than anything else was an apology, a full blown, grovelling, snivelling, trouser wetting apology, utter humiliation. And it wasn't forthcoming, to be honest.

Yes, the bankers were very sorry, but who could possibly foresee the crisis in the wholesale money market? So not our fault, guv. No, the people I felt pity for was us, for Britain, an off-the-shelf country hollowed out, sold on, and dumped offshore.

We desperately need to find a way out of this economic calamity which, indeed, could be worse than anything we've faced for a hundred years. But frankly, it looks like we're going to be happy with a sorry.

And I wonder if our anger will sustain us to reorganize our relationship with the state and with corporations, to radically rethink what kind of democracy we want. How do we nationalize the banks? How do we separate retail banking from investment? Protect the retail and let the investment sector die.

How do we de-merge these vast behemoths? How do we create a dominant mutual sector? How do we shut down tax havens and make the rich shoulder their rightful share of the tax burden? How do we recalibrate our democracy to remove lobbying all together? How do we recapture the state from corporations?

These are the most fundamental questions about our role in the state, and we are being served up with bread and circuses to sate our anger with the financial quacks.

And I felt sorry that we might be happy with this spectacle, this unpleasant spasm in the death throes of MRSA capitalism. Though having said that, I still might join the Countryside Alliance.

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