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‘We’ll break you up’: Miliband gets tough on banks

by: IFAonline
  • 01/10/2012
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‘We’ll break you up’: Miliband gets tough on banks
Ed Miliband has suggested a future Labour government will force banks to split their retail and investment arms, should they not do so willingly.

Speaking on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show, Miliband said there needed to be a return to the “best traditions of British banking”, where “banks serve the customer” not international markets.

The Labour Party is meeting for its annual conference, which this year will be held in Manchester.

Miliband said recommendations laid out last year in the Vickers report to separate banks’ High Street parts from their investment side had since been watered down.

The coalition has said it will implement all of Sir John Vickers’ recommendations by 2019.

But Miliband said, if Labour won the 2015 general election and major changes were not in place by then, it would legislate.

“What I want is a country where a small business and an individual going into their High Street bank knows that that bank is working for them, not gambling with their money on the international markets,” Miliband said. “That doesn’t happen at the moment.

“What really worries me is that we’re seeing, and we’ve seen over the last year, a watering down of some of the reforms that the government was talking about to try and make that happen.

“This is a very clear message I have for the banks: Either they sort it out themselves – so that once and for all the High Street bank is not an arm of the casino operation – or the next Labour government will, by law, split those banks up so that once again we return to the best traditions of British banking, which is banks that serve the customer.”

 

 

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