“It is not the purpose of European monetary policy to ensure solvency of national banking systems or governments and it cannot replace necessary economic adjustments or bank balance sheet clean ups,” the Bundesbank announced to an anaesthetised world yesterday.

Most people have now forgotten, but until Gordon’s Barmy Army jumped all over Mervyn King after Northern Rock’s 2007 foundering, our own central banker had this to say:

“It is not the job of the Bank Of England to bail out banks taking wholly unwarranted risks.”

King’s point was that Northern Rock CEO Adam Applegarth was a pillock whom he had warned about stupid wholesale market borrowing. Privately, he felt the bank should fail (pour encourager les autres) but the savers be protected. Brown and Darling said no for entirely political reasons. Then Lehman and TBTF happened. The rest is history, and often complete mystery.

So then: we have had ‘banks should clear up their own mess’, ‘governments should protect the savers’, ‘government will guarantee deposits’, ‘taxpayers must bail out TBTF’, ‘policy makers are not responsible’, ‘central bankers are merely guardians’….and more latterly, ‘depositors are just another set of creditors, the rich must be made to pay for banking failure’.

In short, six years ago we would be protected, but now we’ll be raped. And I say ‘we’ there, because there are two gigantic holes of hypocrisy in the German Bundesbank’s argument:

1. The BB’s calculation of ClubMed wealth once again trots out this German myth that they’re only poor ikkle Huns weally, whereas all those nasty greasy olive-skinned ClubMed Üntermenschen have enormous palaces which they should sell before asking us for any money. (‘And the French too’ left unsaid, but clearly intended).

It is, over the years, the self-pitying talent for misplaced sanctimony that I have found by far the most grating personality flaw of the German banking and political élites. (Their footballers do it too – rolling about and falling down to get key opposing players sent off). The truth is as always more even-handed: ClubMed citizens have been made to look rich by the valuations put on their properties. In reality, they’re paying mortgages on those properties (not enjoying outright ownership) most of the loans are underwater, and nobody in their right mind wants to buy any property there today at its book price. Strip out housing (let’s get real here, you can’t eat bricks and mortgages as if they were fish and chips) and southern Europe is dirt poor compared to the Bundesrepublik. Throw in the pension expectations, and the Germans are easily the wealthiest of the EU Big League.

2. BB’s use of the word ‘rich’ is exactly that: rich. They and the Sprouts tried this same ruse in Cyprus by saying (a) the money there was all Russian and crooked, and (b) people with £100,000 in an offshore island account are simply rich tax evaders by any other name.

The entire description (still widely in use today) is a heinous myth: the dirty money got out – we still don’t know precisely who tipped who off, but we know that Schäuble lied about being unaware of it – leaving often expat, retired depositors to pick up the tab for things done by Franco-German EUnatic currency megalos and crooked pols back in the late 1990s.

Since when did a pension of £20,000 a year plus £100,000 as a hedge against inflation make somebody ‘rich’? Statistically, it makes them poorer than every single Eurocrat employed at middle level and above in Brussels and Berlin.

The process is so obviously clear to anyone who’s awake, the fact that Wiedemann and his mates get away with this sort of tosh is depressingly conclusive evidence that most EU citizens with a moderate savings pot are away with the Fairies. Two movements are now taking place before the locked-off camera of this farce: Sovereigns and central bankers are quietly but quickly exiting from the spotlights…and the citizenry are being nudged into it, blindfolded.

Government-protected savers have become first, risk-taking investors, and then creditors. And to make the whole thing sound vaguely justified, those retreating out of the limelight are positioning ordinary people as carpet-bagging mafiosa. It’s almost too wonderfully silly to be real.

The terror of the predators

turns Ministers into traitors

and savers into creditors

with bureaucrats as spectators.

Earlier: Sloggers sent to bed happy as Jeremy Hunt’s payday evaporates