So did Britain enjoy it's little show trial?

A famous leader once said that to keep a population docile and obedient the government only needs to provide two things; Bread and Circuses.

With the UK economy firmly in a recession that could be as bad as the great depression itself it is clear the British government has run out of bread. Their only hope now is to provide the best damn circus the world has ever seen. Today they gave it their best try by summoning the former senior executives of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) to appear in front of a House of Commons select committee to explain why their greedy bonus culture destroyed the UK economy.

So well publicised was this exercise in blood letting that MP's, members of the public, reporters and the bank executives themselves first had to run a gauntlet of protesters outside the building. Even though they'd been whipped up by three days of Ministerial hysteria of bank bonuses these protesters just about managed to avoid turning up with pitchforks and burning torches but were still upset enough to turn their ire on anybody who arrived by taxi. The hearings themselves were televised live but not one but two BBC channels in the hope that they would be a bruising exchange between the cartoon supervillan bankers and the heroic MP's who had come to save the day.

In the end it didn't turn out quite like that because the first thing the bank executives did was admit they'd made mistakes and were very sorry about those mistakes not least they themselves had lost an awful lot money in the process. This pretty much took the wind out of the committee's sails because they knew full well that the people in front of them had already lost their jobs and there was nothing they or anybody else to do to change the past. The MP's still tried to make a go of it though by trying to grill Sir Tom McKillop, the former RBS chairman over why he decided to buy Dutch Bank ABN Ambro when it's shares were at the top of the market. McKillop admitted that yes it was a big mistake and added that with the benefit of hindsight he would not have done it if he knew at the time it was the top of the market.

By the time the committee got round to Andy Hornby the former head of HBOS they had nothing to through at him other then the fact that his previous job was with Asda, the successful supermarket chain. The MP's lack of ammunition came as no great surprise because prior to September 2008 HBOS was a comparatively strong bank. It didn't give out sub-prime loans, the loans it did approve were backed up by a strong book of good assets and they were particularly invested in so-called toxic mortgage backed securities. In fact the only problem that HBOS had was then when American banks started collapsing and the Large Hadron Collider got switched on persons unknown *coughs*Lloyds-TSB*coughs* started short selling HBOS shares in massive volumes. This caused the share price to collapse causing a crisis in confidence that dried up HBOS' cash flow. With no access to ready cash HBOS had no other choice then to be "rescued" by being forced into a shotgun marriage with Lloyds-TSB creating a super bank which in effect nationalised some 60% of the British Banking industry.

All in all watching this particular circus ended up being almost as dull as writing about it so I really hope the government gives it another go. They could perhaps invite the Chief Executive of Lloyds TSB and the Chief Executive of the Wellcome trust to appear and explain why the economy, along with some many other things, really started going wrong in the summer of 2006.