By Daily Mail Comment
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As a response to the monumental scandals convulsing the City, David Cameron’s promise of a joint Lords and Commons Parliamentary inquiry is, frankly, inadequate.
Anyone with experience of such hearings knows how it will turn out. The panel will lack the expertise to ask the right questions â€" or understand the answers â€" on matters of huge complexity.
It will then divide on party lines, with the Conservatives trying to cause maximum embarrassment to Labour, and vice-versa. MPs will grandstand.
Chancellor George Osborne, left, and Bob Diamond at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, last year
And anyway, do politicians who have fiddled their expenses so egregiously have the moral authority to interrogate bankers?
No, such an inquiry, even on oath, is nowhere near good enough.
There may just be a case, as the Prime Minister argues, for a narrow inquiry to reach a quick conclusion on how to avoid a repetition of the rigging of Libor, the interest rate at which banks lend to each other. But we have our doubts.
For the systemic corruption in the City goes so much deeper â€" and affects so many millions of livelihoods around the world â€" that the case for a separate, Leveson-style judicial inquiry into the conduct and ethics of the financial sector is quite simply unanswerable.
Indeed, the voicemail-hacking antics of the News of the World, contemptible as they were, are insignificant beside the bankers’ behaviour, which brought us to the brink of collapse.
This is not just a story of reckless lending, driven by greed for bonuses, or the bundling together of good and bad debts to sell on to the unsuspecting.
It isn’t just about the mis-selling of insurance policies and bank loans to trusting customers, which has driven many small businesses to the wall.
Nor is it just about the banks’ casual neglect of their core duty to look after the money entrusted to them in the High Street, which denied countless families access to their earnings when a computer system, outsourced to India, crashed without proper back-up.
No, this is also about the integrity of a system on which our whole way of life depends. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the banks stand accused of a series of crimes against so ciety itself.
Too close? Baroness Vadera prepared a paper which considered how to reduce Libor
As today’s revelations make painfully clear, politicians and public servants also have searching questions to answer.
Could the last Labour government, which shamelessly schmoozed the City, be implicated in the conspiracy to rig Libor? Certainly, Baroness Vadera seems to have been unfortunately close to bankers in this whole rotten saga.
It is even suggested that the Bank of England, for centuries a byword for integrity, may have had a hand in it.
As for the Conservatives, including the Prime Minister and Chancellor, are they so close to the City that they want to spare their friends embarrassment? They know how they could dispel that suspicion. But will they?
Yes, it is right that Stephen Hester of RBS is giving up his bonus for a second year â€" although all bankers should now follow him. It is also right that the chairman of Barclays has resigned â€" and the Mail trusts others, in his boardroom and elsewhere, will do th e same.
It is encouraging, too, that the Serious Fraud Office will decide within a month whether it can bring criminal charges against traders (although we are not holding our breath on that score). But none of this is enough.
To an unhealthy extent, Britain’s prosperity depends on the success of the financial sector. And that in turn depends on the City’s long-standing reputation for trustworthiness, now deeply sullied.
Only a full judicial inquiry can begin to restore that good name. Anything less will smack of a cover-up.
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