It's time the greedy banks stopped ripping us all off

I suppose when you boil it down, we actually use our bank very little. Indeed, having just looked at the stubs, we’ve used the chequebook on fewer than a handful of occasions in the last five months – probably because Herself pays most of the regular bills (and an increasing number of the others) online.

We maintain a credit balance in our current account which ensures that we are never overdrawn and, insofar as credit cards are concerned, we have never paid one penny in interest – the fact that Herself now does so much of the spadework online makes all this easier anyway.

We rarely pay in cheques – income arrives at the bank electronically – and withdrawals are almost invariably made via the hole in the wall. Neither of us can remember the last time we actually spoke to an employee of the bank both of us have used since we were teenagers – it’s certainly many years ago.

There are no doubt many others in a similarly fortunate position and I stress that I’ve made these points not to brag about the way we now handle our financial affairs – very many others operate equally prudently with little else but an old age pension of diminishing value coming in – but to make a serious point to someone.

Geoff Cook, the chief executive of something called Jersey Finance – which exists to promote the Island’s finance industry and, despite its worth to participating firms, is not, as I understand it, wholly financed by its members but gets a whack from taxpayers also – has called for an end to what he describes as ‘free banking’.

He described it as a mirage – about the only thing he said that I agree with. Clearly he has little idea of the feelings of thousands of people in Jersey who, like me and Herself, have watched the difference in interest paid to depositors and the rates charged to borrowers widen (without exception in the banks’ favour), have seen interest rate changes increases implemented immediately for borrowers and often months later for depositors, and who have in more recent times watched with mounting incredulity the way in which these same banks literally gambled with our savings and reaped obscene individual and corporate financial rewards.

As Mr Cook well knows, the circumstances I’ve outlined above do not constitute free banking in any shape or form. I pay in terms of no interest on a current account and next to nothing on a deposit or savings account.

Of course, in his however many point plan to restore the image of the industry upon which he seems to remain reliant upon for a living, Mr Cook offers the paltry sop of wanting to see an end to the bonus culture and excessive pay packages. If Honest Nev was still in business as a bookie it would be worth a few quid on bank charges being introduced light years before any changes to the greed culture came about, that’s for sure.

A few years ago a statement such as that made last week by Mr Cook – presumably through one of the two PR agencies Jersey Finance finds it necessary to use – would have made people like me sit up and think that perhaps he had a point.

Today, so fed up are we with those we used to trust with our life savings playing fast and loose with that money – not far removed, it seems, from playing the tables at Monte Carlo or the slot machines in Las Vegas – that if he told us that years ago five pound notes used to be white, we’d demand proof before we uttered another word.

Further alienating your customers will not help your cause, Mr Cook, and it really is time you got real and understood that. We’ve all been ripped off too frequently and for far too long to trust anything emanating from your industry.

THE good parishioners of St Lawrence meet tonight to consider whether or not to recommend to the Licensing Assembly that the old British Union Hotel – opposite the parish church and parish hall, as it happens – be given a pub licence. Well, that’s almost true except that the place is now apparently called the Saint Laurent Public House.

That amounts to as incongruous a mix of two languages as it’s possible to get and I’d put money on the fact that the pub’s owners did it (probably with the best of intentions) in order to demonstrate some link with the Island. Not far removed, perhaps, from the bloke it Jersey for the first time who gets off the plane and 20 minutes later is calling everyone ‘mon vie’.

Without getting too pedantic about Portuguese, Polish, Latvian or perhaps even Estonian – indeed any of the tongues which can be heard in King Street – the fact is that English and French have always sat pretty comfortably with each other but have rarely successfully mixed.

Hence Connetable de Ste Marie looks and sounds better than Constable de/of Ste Marie and there must be scores of other examples.

As someone who has bemoaned the relatively recent fad – introduced, I think, by the late and otherwise much lamented Ann Street Brewery – for changing well-established Jersey pub names simply for the sake of it, it looks as if the nonsense continues.

How I’d love the good people of St Lawrence to approve the recommendation tonight but conditional upon the name British Union Hotel being retained.

And finally,

I agree with fellow columnist Meridian, who criticised uniforms for the honorary police, and particularly black shirts. I go further – I don’t like that colour shirt worn by any police officer.