I don't know too much about banks and banking, but here's someone who does - Mick Moran, not long retired from his post as W.J.M. MacKenzie Professor of Government at the University of Manchester, and an old friend and former colleague of mine:
Listening to the Commons exchanges yesterday on the Chancellor's proposal for a Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into the LIBOR scandal was depressing. It was the Commons at its worst: blame shifting; moralising; and, above all, opportunistic point scoring across the floor. It's not just the bankers who don't get it; lots of MPs also do not realise the scale of the disaster that is the UK financial system. A Parliamentary inquiry is a quite inadequate response to the scale of the problem. Some Parliamentary inquiries, notably those by the Treasury Select Committee, have done good work. But even when not beset by party divisions they simply have not measured up to the job.
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The LIBOR scandal is being trailed by the financial establishment as precisely that: a scandal. In other words, a single disgraceful event, and in the manner of all scandals in Britain it is taking a predictable course: moralistic fulminations, and the sacrifice of a few prominent scapegoats. Morals are important; the amorality revealed in the Barclays' emails is shocking to normal people. And it is certainly the case that wrongdoers need to be pursued and punished. But here at CRESC [Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change], where we have been tracking the financial crisis since 2007, we have been arguing for some time that there are fundamental defects in our financial system, and that these won't be solved by short term hunting down of scapegoats.
Mick goes on to argue that we 'need to dispense with the illusion that a casino is the best way to organise the financial system for a modern economy' and that a full Leveson-style inquiry is needed, as well as 'a fundamental redefinition of the social and economic roles of finance'.
