Banking is fried, business is fucked

The arrest of the gormless ingénu Sam Bankman-Fried should be an alarm for us all

The most telling thing about the Sam Bankman-Fried case is that, while years in prison and the utter ruin of his family are held over his head, he seems unable to grasp exactly what he's done wrong. It is as if he had walked through someone's unlocked back door to find the kitchen table stacked with banknotes and thought, "Well, they're obviously not using them. And, after all, some of it will go to philanthropy ..." (The term's contemporary meaning is aptly defined in the latest Private Eye as "The receiving of very large amounts of money in order to improve one's own conditions while talking about charitable causes.)

Is this the face of a hedge-funder? Bankman-Fried's ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison

I was astonished, having read about the antics of his on-and-off ex-girlfriend, to see her picture. She looks like what she essentially is: a 12-year-old Harry Potter fan. How is it that children are let loose to play with and lose billions of other people's dollars? Many will smugly give the one-word answer: crypto. But that won't do. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with crypto, which is a commodity more or less like any other -- and is being used as a scapegoat to mask the real problem: business and finance are utterly fucked.

The last thing we need is less regulation. As things stand, people are routinely making fortunes from activities than in any other arena would be crimes. Think of the PPE profiteers. These people exploited the desperation of pusillanimous and ill-informed ministers to make obscene amounts of wealth. The government is now pursuing a few of them in the civil courts -- but these shysters should be on remand awaiting criminal trial. If a person were found to have squirrelled away £29m not long after using their parliamentary position to chivvy a minister into giving them a gigantic contract, in my opinion that would obviously be worth a jail term.

The revolving door between politics and business is the source of vast amounts of moneymaking. A recent proposal was to fine an MP £16,000 if they were found to have abused it. It sounds a lot until you learn that £16,000 is simply an MP's payoff from their notice period of three months. Is that really the heaviest penalty anyone can think of. How about prison?

Britain has the lowest public sector to GDP ratio and the lowest tax revenue to GDP ratio of any civilised country (I do not include America in that category). If every worker produced an equal share of that GDP, the average salary would be well over £60,000. Even if you allow some money to stay in the businesses themselves, in this hypothetical country the income tax take, if everyone paid up in full, would be about £450bn. The UK's actual income tax revenue is about £200bn. Even these fag-packet figures tell you something is going wrong.

Another factor at work here is the law. Many people in business and finance are certain, even without having to think about it, that whatever they do must be legal because they belong to the law-owning class, not the law-breaking class. Stuffing your filthy pockets after conniving in the near-ruin of sterling? Perfectly legal. These people do not understand that for many in Britain the law is the obstacle between eating and not eating; between shivering and puking in withdrawal and being able to function. It is a tiny thing, a barrier as slender as graphene, that can be breached with a few words or an outstretched hand -- an insignificant sin compared with the daily actions of some short-sellers, asset-strippers and other charmers of the business world.

If Britain is to become a sophisticated, civilised and above all just country, a way must be found to revolutionise the way business and finance is conducted. The same moral distinctions must apply as in every other area of life. Those who have played a part in exacerbating inflation have stolen poor pensioners' money just like a bag-snatcher. It is a sign of our spiritually spavined society that this is not obvious, to Labour any more than the Conservatives. This is not a call for communism -- quite the opposite. I long for true capitalism -- a market and, even more than that, a country in which every person can compete fairly.