Bankers deserve Archie Norman’s darts - they have to be broken as the unions were

Archie Norman, recently appointed chairman of ITV and one-time Tory MP, generated a headline for himself over the weekend with his assertion that the economic crisis the country faces today is greater than the one inherited by Mrs Thatcher from the Labour government of Jim Callaghan in 1979.

"The level of public debt and the public-sector borrowing requirement is greater than the challenge in sheer numbers that Margaret Thatcher faced in 1979," he said.

It is a clever comment, well worthy of an ex-politician, because while it is true, it is meaningless.

Mrs Thatcher, when she came to power, did not face a crisis in the government finances.

That had come to a head three years previously with the arrival of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in November 1976.

The IMF demanded fiscal restraint as a condition of its support. Roy Jenkins, who became Chancellor, delivered in spades — so much so that the public finances when he handed over to the incoming Thatcher government were in remarkably good shape. One might reasonably say it was the only thing which was, but that's another issue.

The problem Thatcher faced was industrial relations and a tribe of trade union leaders who had forgotten that they were part of wider society.

They had learned that they had the power to defy government and could take more than their fair share of economic output, more or less with impunity.

They took a near-sadistic delight in humiliating any minister who had the temerity to ask them to show restraint or to consider the adverse effect of their behaviour on the rest of the population.

They defined responsibility purely in terms of their own self interest.

They were out of control — they were, in fact, behaving with exactly the same arrogance and abuse of power as the investment banking leaders are today, with that same belief that the world exists to suit them, not the other way round.

The next government does indeed face a Thatcher-like challenge, but, just as she had to break the power of the trade union leaders, it has to break the power of the investment bankers.

It will have to find a way to curb their excessive rewards, and cut back their trading to a level where it is, in Adair Turner's words, socially useful.

We need a world where finance is no longer an end in itself, but gets its rewards from providing an essential service to the wider economy.

Bringing about the end of banking as we know it and the return to banking as we used to know it is indeed as big a challenge as anything faced by
Mrs Thatcher — but it is nothing to do with the public finances.