Bankers!

Banks became important to us as individuals when companies demanded that ‘we’, their employees, needed bank accounts. Putting cash in a brown, window-envelope complete with payslip had become too much trouble for them. As bankers looked at the advent of millions of deposits from captive customers they knew they’d cracked it.

From then on we had to check with our banks that our money was in our accounts. Invariably it wasn’t. We went to the accounts department and remonstrated with the bean counters. ‘My kids have to eat, so what’s the story?’ They held up their hands and cheerfully blamed the banks. They were right. It became standard practice for bankers to exploit our money for as long as they can get away with it. That’s what bankers do.

Workers did receive an envelope. Inside was a meaningless document called ‘Payslip’. Originally a simple record of money earned, the slip had morphed into a something resembling a research paper by a demented nuclear physicist. To this day, most workers do not understand what, how or why they are being rewarded and robbed at the same time.

Concerned that my ubiquitous UK high street bank did not have my best interest at heart – they failed to inform me that my savings interest rate had been lowered three times - I changed to a bank owned by Spaniards. It was no big coup on their part. I’d used all my redundancy money to buy a motor-caravan, which I then sold at a huge loss. Fearful I would be impoverished before my desultory pension kicked in, I sought a new haven for the remainder of my nest egg. Nest egg? A predatory cuckoo’s misplaced chick would have heaved it straight out of the nest with ridiculous ease.

Nothing went right. (I blame the Spaniards.) They not only duplicated the new account, they fouled up my address details. Stuff sent to my Dutch address never arrived. I made phone calls to their Customer Service department located, not in Santander, but in Pokhara, a small town in central Nepal. Wherever! An unreconstructed Maoist and I - he claimed to be an advisor – misunderstood each other. Stalemate prevailed and nothing changed until I went to the UK and kicked an underpaid English teller’s ass.

The Credit Crunch played into their hands. To my relief and their credit the Spaniards had not been sucked into the sub-prime, derivative-beribative vortex. My northern Spanish bankers were not dopey Northern rockers or nasty Lehman brethren. Off the government’s controlling hook they blew their own trumpets mightily. They’re so chuffed with themselves they’ve decided to ditch the iconic UK banks they own, electing to go public about a Spanish heritage.

If their UK banks had worthy reputations this might be a mistake. But they don’t. Indebted Britons won’t give a damn that Spaniards now control the money they don’t have. Elizabeth the First’s Protestant (and Jewish) moneylenders must be turning in their graves.

To add insult to injury caused by painfully low rates for the common man – that’s the rest of us - the Bank of England’s interest management policy serves the bankers well. They have just announced that their unworthy UK subsidiaries have made lots of money: for them. Profits are sizzling like paella in a pan. In the first nine months of 2009 they made 1.3 billion euros. Now that’s a nest egg!

Realising that the announcement sounded like gloating, when nearly 4 million heavily indebted Britons might be unemployed by the end of the same year, they had the brass neck to add a ‘oops!’ proviso: “The UK economy is still fragile.” What colossal chutzpah! Fragile? I’ll say it’s fragile. Spanish or otherwise, these people are Bankers with a capital B.

I’m off on my travels and will be forced to use their wretched debit card at ATM machines in exotic locations. I’m getting too old to carry cash around and fight whoever would relieve me of it. Did you know that banks sometimes block cards for security reasons, especially when you’re abroad and want to use them? They do. It happened to me, and guess what? You have to phone a Maoist in Pokhara and beg him to unblock it.

He’ll hum and haa, check his list and ask embarrassing questions. The one about my long dead mother’s maiden name tends to catch me out. Despite him calling you ‘sir’ you want to crawl down the line and kill him with his own Kalashnikov. Why? Because you’re paying for the call!

To avoid this blood-sucking trap I sent an email asking them to make sure that my debit card was not blocked. Two days later they replied: not ‘they’ but their automatic, standard letter reply system. Did it understand? No it did not. It merely told me how expensive it was to use their card in foreign ATM machines and that my daily limit was insufficient to feed and accommodate a cuckoo’s well-muscled chick. Next time I’m in the UK…

Bankers! Akira the Don got it right when he advised us to ‘put our fingers in the corners of our mouth and say, “Wxxkers”’.