Occupy your bank account (UK)

There's an overriding problem with the Occupy movement. The majority of people have responsibilities that mean they can't put their lives on hold to sit in a tent and protest for weeks on end. And the fact that there are people who can do this leaves the movement open to the charge that the people doing the protesting are just an unrepresentative, pampered or workshy minority (as I've mentioned before).

It's a bit of a Catch-22 situation. Most of the political class seem either unable to comprehend the seriousness of the situation, or are unable to stand up to those lobbying on behalf of a broken system that's dragging the rest of us down, yet the people with the time and commitment to press for change are marginalised.

The best way forward I can see for the Occupy movement is to become a catalyst for the sort of mass activism that involves the majority of people who can't just take a month off to man the barricades. There's already something along these lines, an idea that, I think deserves some support. The Move Your Money project in the US 'aims to empower individuals and institutions to divest from the nation's largest Wall Street banks and move to local financial institutions'.

I'm no great fan of consumer activism when there's any other alternative, being old-fashioned enough to believe in one person, one vote, regardless of that person's spending power, but the call to "Occupy Your Bank Account" is at least something a lot of ordinary people could get involved in and something that could potentially make a difference, if enough people could be persuaded to take their money out of 'Too Big To Fail' banks and put it somewhere else - Move Your Money suggests community banks and credit unions.

Could this work, either in the US or here in the UK? Inertia sticks most people to their existing bank accounts - the faff of changing, (especially if you've got a few direct debits) is enough to put people off moving their money. On the practical side, a lot of people also stick because of the convenience of having a local branch of Whatever Megabank Plc in their area, with gives them access to a network of ATMs more or less wherever they are.

On the ideological side, there's also evidence that a lot of people just don't care or, even more depressingly are venting their anger and frustration on the victims of the financial chaos, rather than on the perpetrators.

There is hope, though. If I google the slogan "occupy your bank account", I find quite a few bank web sites popping up among the activist Facebook groups and so on. NatWest tops the list and, hilariously, that embarrassingly ungrateful state-subsidised amalgam of arrogance, greed and failure, the Royal Bank of Scotland, comes second. Maybe they're just a little bit scared.

If the megabanks have been tweaking their Search Engine Optimisation to assimilate anti-megabank slogans (You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile), it might be a signal that they're a little bit worried that people might get angry enough to empty their accounts.

The Credit Unions suggested by Move Your Money might be a good place for a savings account, should you be lucky enough to have savings but, as far as I know, they don't offer a full range of services, such as, for example, a debit card you can stick into a Link ATM (although it looks as if there are some Credit Union Debit Cards out there). Still, you can find out if there's a Credit Union you could join here.

But if you want to punish the big boys and still be with a big(ish) name on the high street, with Internet banking and a usable debit/cashpoint card and all the other services the average account holder wants, you could always bank with the Co-op:

The Co-operative Bank is still the only UK high street bank with an Ethical Policy voted on by its customers. So, as a customer, it's you who has the final say about where your money goes and where it doesn't...

Being owned by a co-operative, we're accountable to our members and customers, not stock markets and speculators. Also, because we don't have shareholders to consider, we can aim to deliver stable and sustainable growth and whenever possible avoid taking excessive risks.

From the Co-operative Bank's web site. Things aren't quite as ethically perfect as the blurb on the web site makes out - the Co-op Bank still has substantial investments in Imperial Tobacco and British American Tobacco - but I reckon you can keep a clearer conscience banking with the Co-op still than with your average high street bank and, if you join, you have a vote and a voice to change things. They may not have many local branches, but they've got Link cash machines.

I like to think that the Co-op appear third in the search results for "occupy your bank account" because their ethical principles genuinely set them apart from the other banks who just seem to be trying to cynically co-opt the phrase to airbrush their image (the most cynical being the executives at the disgraceful Royal Bank of Scotland, who should hang their collective heads in shame for trying to appropriate an ethical finance slogan whilst having gone further than any other bank in denying 1.1 million of its basic bank account customers access to the majority of free cash machines). Fred the Shred may be gone, but the foul stench of his spirit lingers.

Or you could join the Nationwide, the world's largest building society and the largest UK building society not to be swept away in the suicidal wave of demutualisations of the '80s and '90s (despite the carpetbaggers' attempts to take them down). Remember when the bits of the of the last demutualised society, Bradford and Bingley, had to be nationalised or sold off to Santander?

For the past decade the banks, building societies and other specialist lenders have all taken part in the biggest house price, and mortgage lending, boom in the UK's history.

One thing that has helped the banks in particular has been their ability to borrow money from other financial institutions, rather than just from savers, to fund their mortgage lending.

Building societies are restricted by law to funding just 50% of their lending this way and the average among societies is much less, at about 30%.

It is this borrowing, and the current difficulty in repaying it, that lies at the heart of the problems that have been experienced by the Northern Rock, Halifax and now the B&B.

Noted the BBC at the time. A responsible organisation that didn't participate in the speculative, bubble-inflating madness that the rest of us are still paying for seems like a pretty good place to put your pennies, especially when it gives you access to Link cash machines, Internet banking and possibly even a branch near you.

I'm not sure that any movement can arouse the necessary levels of political engagement and solidarity needed for a mass closure of accounts in the big banks, given current levels of cynicism and scapegoating (if the big banks had attracted the same level of vitriolic abuse as their victims, like the unemployed, the disabled and public sector workers, the buggers really would be running scared).

Maybe the message needs to include an appeal to self-interest, too - after all, come the next, or next-but-one, crash the country might run out of money to bail out reckless banks and then where will you be if you trusted one of them with your life's savings? I'm sure of one thing, though - the current political parties and their leaders aren't up for delivering any real change in the balance of power.

If the politicians had the desire or the ability to deliver real change and sustainable finance, we might have seen it when the time came to dispose of the failed Northern Rock bank. But they weren't able to do anything bold, like breaking it up and selling the bits to responsible mutual building societies, (partly due to European Commission rules putting a time limit on how long the Rock could stay in public ownership). The resulting deal saw the big financial institutions partying like the global financial crisis never happened:

To sum up: the Virgin deal guarantees big losses for the taxpayer, uses exotic financial techniques analogous to those which caused the Rock to collapse in the first place, and leaves us with a bank which is measurably less safe.

And, as we've just seen, the City of London has only to whistle for its toy bulldog, Cameron to come trotting obediently to heel, so it's not too difficult to work out that you've got a better chance of seeing magic unicorns floating down from the clouds to make everything better than you have of seeing the current generation of politicians putting the interests of the people who elected them before those of massive financial institutions. If change doesn't come from below, it's not coming at all.

Emptying bank accounts might work, as might other forms of activism; targeting political parties and their events and conferences, exposing the lobbying and PR industry that trumps democratic mandates, maybe even putting up parliamentary candidates in the style of Martin Bell, the "anti-sleaze" candidate in the 1997 UK general elections. Putting up some tents and making a lot of noise is absolutely necessary to keep the issue at the top of the news, where it belongs, but I don't think it's sufficient any more.