I would hazard a guess that he might consider Margaret Thatcher to be a 'dangerous liberal'..

Nice point though and I agree. Looked at some of his other posts though..

British consumers have free personal banking. If this is paid for by eejits who can't stop spending when they have no money in their accounts, so much the better. And anyone who thinks that threatening their bank with legal action will have no consequences to the relationship is also a bit dim.

I'm looking forward to all the media hand-wringing that's sure to arrive in a couple of years over the scandalously massive increase in people getting into huge overdrafts that they can't handle. Not holding my breath for any appreciation of cause and effect, mind.

If this is paid for by eejits who can't stop spending when they have no money in their accounts, so much the better.

It's not always eejits, and it's not always spending.

I'm self-employed, and a few years ago all hell broke loose in a client's accounts department. At the time, they were my only client, and I was doing a huge amount of work for them. But then invoices got lost, and payments would arrive anything up to four months overdue.

Bear in mind that those payments were my wages, and bear in mind that as a freelance contractor there's fuck all you can do about such problems.

As soon as I realised there was a problem, I spoke to my bank. I need to extend my overdraft. They said no. How about a loan? No. Instead, they took this approach:

* Refusing to pay any direct debits because I didn't have sufficient funds to cover them.
* Charging £40 for each refused DD (and the requesters imposed their own charges of £20-£40)
* Applying those charges immediately, taking me over my authorised overdraft limit. Immediate £90 penalty for that, plus interest, with further penalties for every day I remained over my o/d limit.

In a single week, my bank charged me a total of £400 for returning a couple of direct debits; the late payment situation continued for a while, and generated several thousand pounds in penalty fees for the bank - so when the payments finally *did* come in, they were swallowed by the various charges, which meant I wasn't able to save any of the money, which meant the next late payment problem caused the whole thing to kick off again.

So as you can imagine, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the banks now that customers are revolting.

Oh, I don't have any sympathy for the banks — as a rule, they're all bastards. I just don't think that being a bastard should be illegal, and I don't think that the purpose of legislation is to force people to be lovely.

When it comes to overdraft charges, I reckon there's a certain amount of evidence that British banks are operating as a cartel, all keeping the charges ludicrously high so that they can "compete" by offering marginally less ludicrously high charges. But I don't think the solution to a cartel is to make it illegal to make profit out of a certain type of transaction, which is one hell of an alarming precedent, not to mention a trampling of liberty.

In your own case, well, the charges are particularly bad (direct debits cost approximately nothing to process), but the real problem is not so much the charges for the unauthorised overdraft as the refusal to give you an authorised one. If a bank is going to refuse overdraft extensions to people with cash-flow problems, they should be refusing to take self-employed customers in the first place.

If you specifically ask a bank when you join whether they're any good for self-employed people and they give all sorts of effusive yeses, they might well be guilty of mis-selling if they try something like that. Especially if they have a "Self-employed? We love you!" leaflet or something.

But I don't think the solution to a cartel is to make it illegal to make profit out of a certain type of transaction

But the law is the law, and in the case of charges it (the unfair terms in consumer contracts regulations 1999) does seem pretty clear that banks can only charge reasonable admin costs rather than use unauthorised OD charges as a stick to beat people with. If they are indeed making profits to the extent that reducing penalty charges mean the end of free banking, then they're breaking the law.

they might well be guilty of mis-selling

Oh, that's a whole other issue - the payment protection insurance I was assured covered self-employment but which, of course, didn't.

> the law is the law

Oh, absolutely, yes. But the point of the original post was that it's not the sort of law a rabid right-winger like what lefties think The Mail is staffed by would support.

True, true. But then any law that has the potential to give people cash is surprisingly popular :) That, and any end to free banking won't really hurt DM readers anyway.