"I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) on introducing this important debate and thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting time for it. My take on the motion is fairly simple: what is there not to like? It suggests that the Government should
"I will come to the question of demutualisation in a moment. I simply suggest that Government Members read a book called “The New Few” by Ferdinand Mount, who happened to be Margaret Thatcher’s head of policy. He argued for a more resilient capitalism, including a mixed economy in banking provision, …..." Jon Cruddas - View Speech
"A collective hit of £14 billion on taxpayers does not seem to be good, rigorous or empirically grounded economics, so my hon. Friend is absolutely right.
Let me return to the question of bank deposits. Apart from anything else, the lack of diversity in the UK’s banking system leaves us …..." Jon Cruddas - View Speech
"Labour was in government, and many of us were arguing that we should have created this opportunity to diversify forms of banking products. The hon. Gentleman might have meant the debate about the future of the Post Office, and many of our colleagues were involved in trying to articulate the …..." Jon Cruddas - View Speech
"My hon. Friend is exactly right, so let us talk about stakeholder banks and look at some of the evidence. I refer colleagues to the NEF document “Reforming RBS” and some of its findings. First, stakeholder banks tended to be better capitalised and less volatile before the crisis, and they …..." Jon Cruddas - View Speech
"I agree. I was talking about co-operative banking across the whole of Europe, not the specific case of the Co-operative bank here in the UK, which does have problems. [Interruption.]..." Jon Cruddas - View Speech
"Point taken. The stakeholder banks across Europe kept the real economy going while commercial banks’ lending was crashing.
The third point is that in the UK we paid the price for having deliberately dismantled stakeholder banks in the 1980s via demutualisation. We left ourselves with nothing to break the catastrophic …..." Jon Cruddas - View Speech
"That is a good point. What are they doing to build a more mixed economy that is more resilient and is not prone to the catastrophic speculative attacks and collapse in lending that we saw at the back end of 2008?
"The hon. Gentleman seems to be hiding behind one example when all the evidence across western market economies suggests that more co-operative banking does indeed have a part play in creating a more resilient modern capitalism.
What does all this mean for RBS? The Government have presented an artificial choice …..." Jon Cruddas - View Speech