Royal Bank of Scotland

Debate between Jon Cruddas and Adrian Bailey

Thursday 5th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jon Cruddas]

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.]

[Mr Adrian Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Lab/Co-op)]

It never had to be nationalised.

[Jon Cruddas]

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 fall in lending by the big banks, and since the crisis we have done next to nothing to address that fatal structural flaw. I would have thought that we could all agree that a more resilient capitalism is a desirable outcome.