I wanted to post on this and still may do, but Gerald Warner has beat me to it and he has a much larger readership! I for one, had a 'vested interest' in this ruling as I get charged £60 a month for my overdraft and I get £60 a week. I heard on the radio yesterday that the Bank of England secretly gave RBS and Lloyds another massive bailout this year and didn't tell anyone...The banks get 'financial help' and we get shafted by the banks. Crackin'!
Courtesy of The Telegraph
Thank you, Supreme Court: now our votes are on offer to the party that will crucify the banks.
'So, now we know. The highest court in the land thinks it is perfectly equitable and moral for banks routinely to charge customers £35 for a transaction that costs them £2.50. It believes an automatic charge of £12 for inadvertently going 10p over the agreed overdraft limit – followed by daily penal charges – is how British institutions should do business.
It has benevolently nodded through every exaction, penalty and shameless scam that the fertile minds of the barrow boys in pinstriped threads can devise. I don’t know about you, but I preferred them in the days when they wore tricorne hats with masks that made them look panda-eyed and shouted “Stand and deliver!”
This is the landmark ruling of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom at the climax of its long 56-day history as the ultimate arbiter of justice in Britain. It is true that its ruling contradicted the views of the High Court, the Appeal Court and every seven-year-old who could recite the Ten Commandments, but never forget it was a technical ruling. So let’s hear no unsporting and uninformed complaints from ignorant laymen, just because they have been robbed of a few thousand pounds. Once again, the sophisticated interpretation has triumphed.
And the sophisticates are out in force to applaud this triumph of sophisticated technicality over outdated financial morality. Never forget, they tell us, that there are eight times as many bank customers who have never gone into the red as there are of those feckless borrowers. You know the kind of undisciplined prodigals I mean: small businessmen trying to keep afloat in a sea of government red tape, buffeted by a recession, burning midnight oil, acquiring ulcers while their wives succumb to heart conditions; family men trying to keep the show on the road – that type of distasteful shyster whose conduct is so keenly reprehended by sober-suited bank managers...'
[For full article click here]
I sympathise - the bank 'lost' my cancellation of direct debit claims when I moved to the US and every month charged me £25 per item [about 7-8 small charity conations etc] and a whopping charge for being overdrawn; plus £30 per letter they sent to an address where I hadn't lived in 12 years.
ReplyDeleteI returned home to find debts of thousands [all due to bank charges]; I spent years paying these off then the payments ceased being withdrawn from my other bank account. [it turned out their credit company had gone bankrupt - most of my payments till then had remained in their coffers and not paid off my bank debt - the residual amount due - still thousands - was transferred to another credit company - who proceeded to bleed me dry until they went belly-up then the same thing happened again - more thousands to pay ; because what I'd paid disappeared in paying off administration-fees in their internal transfers!]
Seven solid years of paying back around three times the amount demanded ; and all due to a bank error they refused to admit - it left me and my family scraping to make ends meet, my starving myself to ensure food was on the table for the kids, boot-polishing over holes in my squelching shoes, covering up the rags I was wearing with a heavy jumper and one christmas my friend paid for our whole christmas - all the presents and food - otherwise we'd have had nothing...and to make things even more ironically stupid - I found it hard to get anything but the most menial job because of my credit rating and court orders against my name !!!
All because one bank-clerk whom I'd rung didn't bother to key in the fax details I'd sent them...
And I went from not owing them a penny to paying back many thousands in charges and default fees and administration costs.
I hope it made them happy....
...and the new supreme court ruling ? The law lords would have at least considered the justice of the issue; now the rich get richer and we pay for it...
What they didn't understand was that the banks didn't make the losses - they sold the debts off to subsidiary credit companies who bled everyone dry ; stole most of the payments, folded and sold the debts on to another company like some ourobouros snake and the poor sods pay their bills many times over !
Licenced grand larceny !
May God forgive them...