In an audio commentary at the end of Season 5 of the Wire, David Simon says that one of the deliberate ironies throughout the entire five seasons was how the Baltimore Sun always missed the real story. For those of you still to indulge in one of the greatest programmes ever made the only story that the Baltimore Sun picked up on in season 5 was a total fabrication set up by Detectives Mcnulty and Freamon to get more funding so that they can do “real police work”.

It seems to me that we live in an age of missed stories and proper analysis. So many that I don’t know which one to focus on first. Will it be the Church of England’s complicity in the complete destruction of a decent education system in England? Will it be what Justin Lewis Anthony calls the myth of leadership in which the Church of England and the English football team have so much in common? Will it be the obsession with the Gospel and being counter-cultural or the mind numbing bandwaggon that is called discipleship? No I will leave those for another time….hopefully!

Instaed of all that I want to focus an apprentices eye on banking and the shallow commentary that surrounds it and the ongoing crisis of 2008 and beyond. There is no doubt that we are where we are becasue of decisions taken twenty to thrity years ago. But those decisions were taken as a response to the the upheavel of the 1970’s and we are all complicit. As a child in the 70’s I remember the power cuts of the Ted Heath era and the double digit inflation and double digit wage demands of the late 70’s. This meant that when production of white goods started drifting overseas governments really did little about it. It was, after all, one way of bringing prices down, keeping wages down and bringing inflation down. The seeds for consumer culture had been laid. In a country that made less and less balance of payments deficit was no longer of any importance, the all important economic indicator would be retail sales…..

In this brave new world where single digit inflation was all important it became clear that if the cap on wages was to be maintained then new ways of lending money had to be found so that people could buy more and more things so that lower paid jobs in supermarkets could be created to replace those being lost in industry. Spitting Image may have mocked the 1980’s News at Ten Job Survey with their giant star to highlight the one job being created in a local cash and carry, but the greatest truths are often spoken in jest! Here was the birth of consumer culture! This is how it began! This is why the banks were de-regulated with such disastrous consequnces 20 years or so down the line….to keep inflation low and enable the building of Meadowhall, the Metro Centre and every other retail park you could care to mention! Tesco’s alone now employ as many people in the UK as mining did in the early 1970’s and I don’t think that your average cashier gets paid much more than the miners did back then!

This is why politicans only talk about regulating the banks when they are in opposition and all talk of re-balancing the economy is just a load of hot air! We have created an economy that depends for its survival on debt and more debt and nothing that any politician has done since 2008 has attempted to change or challenge that…quantative easing, government guarnteed loans, tuition fees all take us deeper into this mire…all ensure that it will happen again! That is the real news story. Until politicans plan for the long term (and we allow them too) and not short term political gain we are going nowhere fast….