Whenever the debate about contemporary banking – and what it allegedly ‘does’ – gets close to the truth, one can always rely on banker PR to pile in and muddy the waters with jargo-bollocks, fantasy statistics, and how much tax the UK banking sector pays to the Exchequer.

This mercifully brief post will therefore stick to the following irrefutable facts as a guide to long-suffering Slog readers. Here goes….

1. The cart and horse goes like this: banking is the horse that pulls the cart of entrepreneurial capitalism. It is not the other way round.

2. Having an all-up derivatives sector valued at ten times global GDP (and consisting entirely of notional, ‘virtual’ money) contributes nothing to real capitalist business, and is the single biggest instability factor in the global finance system.

3. From the mid 1990s onwards, the banking sector consistently lobbied to have regulation either watered down, or easy to avoid. In particular, the key factors of client credit worthiness, bank capital requirement, and separation of retail from merchant banking were all ignored in favour of profits for the banking sector – not the economy that requires finance from that banking sector’s access to funds and markets.

4. Since 2008, precisely the same lobbied opposition has been applied to all the SEC, EU and FSA ideas about how to make banking safer. Not a single major piece of globally applicable legislation has been passed.

Everyone – even bankers themselves – needs to wake up to a simple reality: bankers are children straight out of Lord of the Flies. No adults, no rules, no ethics, no socialisation. They ask for endless glasses of water rather than go to bed. Any application of discipline is ‘so unfair’. All rules are to be flouted – and laughed at behind hands. And given an island cut off from civilisation’s rules, they will run riot.