The Spectator’s Notes: Politicians and bankers both treat their most loyal backers like dirt

The Daily Telegraph’s revelation last Friday that the Financial Conduct Authority was going to arraign companies for 30 years of mis-selling pensions and other products ‘wiped’, as papers like to say, £4 billion off insurance stocks. George Osborne is putting pressure on the chief executive Martin Wheatley to go. The leak was highly embarrassing for the FCA, but the issue itself matters more. It is about how such companies treat longstanding customers. The way they work is through sellers, who hook someone for life in one go, and so the companies do not know or care about their customers. This is a parable of a much wider problem in society, which is that being loyal is considered stupid. It applies strongly to political parties. Traditionally, they have ‘sold’ their policies to individuals and collected membership fees in return. Over the years, it has become ever clearer that those paying the fees are the group in society most disrespected by the parties who take their money. And so, not surprisingly, very few people now join. If a Political Conduct Authority were to investigate how parties have treated their members over the past 30 years, the results would make the insurance companies look pretty good.

Spending a couple of days making speeches in Switzerland recently, I wandered round old Geneva. The city of Calvin has a huge importance in the history of Christianity: his work must have had a liberating effect on people who otherwise lived in fear of priests telling them whether they were saved or damned. His doctrine of predestination is unappealing, but the alternatives are almost equally difficult. Nowadays, most people are nasty about him. I walked into the courtyard of the town hall. A wonderful covered ramp gives off it which is cobbled and without steps, so that horses could ride up it to the higher floors.