It's all your fault

Reading the Financial Times recently, my heart sank.

This happens quite often in fact. Not because the Financial Times is a bad newspaper. Far from it. It is an excellent one and if I could only read one newspaper a day, it would be this one. (OK, I would appreciate a bit more sports reporting, but you can't have everything.)

No, the reason my heart often sinks when reading newspapers is because they contain so much bad news. In the case of the FT, as it is usually called, this means not only the usual political disasters, wars, etc., but also a large dose of financial and business news.

The past year or so has been particularly depressing. We've had the recession, rises in unemployment, bankruptcies, and scandals about bonuses for bankers, and indeed the whole world financial system.

The story that caught my eye recently — and caused my heart to sink — was also about bankers. It wasn't about another scandal, however, but about how bankers in London were being lectured by Christian leaders — and were lecturing each other — about the need for a new "moral compass" in banking.

Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and principal leader of the Church of England, was reported as telling bankers: "We haven't heard people saying, "Well, actually, no, we got it wrong and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, empty."

Sounds good, but I'm not quite sure what he means. What is the "whole fundamental principle"? Making money? Capitalism? If the archbishop wants the end of our economic system, he should say so more clearly. And what do "unreal" and "empty" mean here? (I guess "empty" could refer to the pockets of ordinary investors who lost money in the crash.)

Sorry to be so cynical, but my point is this. Like many people, I agree that banking should be more "socially useful", as Lord Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, said earlier this year in a report for the government.

But I don't like seeing one group of people singled out as the bad guys in the system and told that they need to improve their morals. To me, that smacks of another biblical story — that of the scapegoat.