Bets for the next race
THE best outcome would be one which offers savers and borrowers more choice — between banks, conventional building societies, and Abbey hybrids. The worst would be a high street which only offered different brands of the same kind of bank. We have moved too far in that direction already, with the flotation of the TSB and the increasingly desperate attempts to sell Girobank. The old TSBs were unique. The new one hurried to make itself as much like the other banks as possible, squandering its new-found capital on costly accessories — a Lloyd's broker, a merchant bank. I can imagine building societies doing the same and worse. Once they become banks they have to be public limited companies, with all the temptations that will bring to them. They must exchange their mutual own- ership for the same dreary anonymous institutional owners that the banks have — and that in itself is a diminution of choice. This country lacks (though other countries have) a legal framework which allows for the mutual ownership of banks. We need it, before societies with less sense than the Abbey go public and make fools of them- selves. The Abbey, though, deserves to succeed. Try putting a couple of hundred pounds in the National & Provincial and the Alliance & Leicester, if you fancy your chances of free shares in the next ones down the line.
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