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Reforming Financial Markets

I will bear that in mind for my holiday reading over the summer. I have the vaguest recollection that I may have looked into the Chamber in the course of one of those columns and looked back out again. I remember those debates quite well. As the hon. Gentleman knows, the problem that we had 10 years ago was that the Bank of England never regulated all aspects of financial services. It regulated the banks, but throughout the 1990s it was obvious that many banks had many other interests, such as insurance, that were regulated by other bodies. Such duplication and complication did no one any good. Indeed, the entire self-regulatory regime was pretty discredited by the mid-1990s. As I said to the shadow Chancellor, we can argue for ever and a day about where we draw the line. When the bank or the FSA is doing something, what matters, as the hon. Member for Gosport (Sir Peter Viggers) put it so succinctly, is that a distinction is made between the general supervision of the system, the financial stability, and an organisation that says to each individual, "This is what you should be doing", drilling down into the nuts and bolts of it. The structure that we have is right. It needs to be strengthened and built on, and that is why I make my proposals today.