TV Review: Ian Hislop: When Bankers Were Good (BBC2)

2/5

*****

I watched this documentary on BBC2 (22/11/2011) with Ian Hislop proposing that the bankers from the Victorian era were good. He showed the philanthropic nature of Victorian era financiers Samuel Gurney, George Peabody, Angela Burdett-Coutts and Natty Rothschild. He concludes that the philanthropic nature of these people is something that bankers of today should follow.

The title of the documentary infers that bankers of today are bad. The sole reason they are bad is that they make too much money; they should be giving it away. He brings in ex St Paul’s Canon Chancellor, Giles Fraser, who invariably states that "the love of money is the root of all evil".

Does Ian know what the purpose of a bank is? Firstly a bank is not a charity, it is a business. It is a business that facilitates other businesses and creates wealth for everyone.

Lets look at just a few of the services a bank performs:

1. Money Bank. It stores your money safely. You no longer have to keep it under your mattress and provided that interest rates aren’t held at artificially low rates, helps your money grow through regular interest payments.
2. Short term Credit. It provides people the convenience of borrowing money. This is through the use of credit cards, overdraft services and small loans.
3. Mortgages: It allows people to borrow large sums of money over a long period of time to enable people to purchase homes and investment properties.
4. Business lending: Allows borrowing services to new businesses and to established businesses. It provides the fuel to allow them to expand, to buy new machinery, building locations, etc.

The money it uses to lend is the money you provide in savings. Banks generate billions of dollars of wealth yearly, yet Ian believes that bankers should not benefit from this.

Ian (and everyone else watching that show) should look around their street. How many of the houses would exist if not for the banks? How many cars would there be? How many shops on the high street? How would any of the products and services we use would ever exist without that initial injection of cash banks provide? The world runs on this model.

One thing that he touches upon but he doesn't really elaborate is the fact that in current times, we live in a welfare state supported by an ever increasing tax burden. Like every other business, Banks provide billions of dollars in taxes. He didn't mention that bankers have a tax burden of 50% on income over £100,000. For some reason he doesn't associate Tax with Charity: Tax is enforced charity. Victorian era times did not have this burden.

After showing all the charitable things the bankers of the time had done, he states that living standards for the poor did not increase, that progressively things got worse. So is he saying that charity for charities sake is the most important thing even if it produces no results? That the most important thing is that the rich should not accumulate weath and it is better that they give it away even if it does no discernable good?

The whole inference of the documentary is to show that bankers should be giving more money to charity, however Ian Hislop doesn't provide any evidence to suggest that banks and bankers of today are not giving money for philanthropic causes.