DON'T BANK ON IT
SIR,—Clearly (to use the cliché now popular in the weekly reviews and the posh Sundays) Miss Katharine Whitehorn, in her article 'Don't Bank On It' in the Spectator for August 10, already has the answer to the question that Mr. Fairlie was struggling to frame the week before.
He wondered why people asli the Government for a `sense of purpose' to relieve them from 'the boring chores of managing a free society and making a free economy work, and he is flummoxed by 'the growing interest in the Poujadist element in the Liberal vote.' He also equates the Poujadists with the Mosleyites, a facile comparison which has no foundation in fact.
Monsieur Poujade (and I have only this moment had this confirmed by a Frenchman) supports the small owner/proprietor, the shop around the corner, against the State and Big Business. In this country these are the people who are the main plank in the Conservative Party's platform and as a result they are the most downtrodden.
They are victims of the credit squeeze. Recently I was striving to obtain a modest overdraft (offering four times the amount in security) for a private business, yet I was told by the manager of one bank that if I were the Imperial Tobacco Company-ask- ing for £3,000,000 it would be the easiest thing in the world.
If, as Mr. Fairlie suggests, we do have a free economy (which I doubt) the banks would be free to lend money to whom they pleased. They would not, as Miss Whitchorn points out, look on their customers as 'tiresome children who have to be protected from access to their own pocket-money.' Neither would they be forced to operate for the benefit of Big Business against the interests of the small man. Miss Whitehorn is right when she describes their approach to a customer (and anyone
wishing to borrow money on adequate security is, after all, a customer)--`the smaller the amount, the more overbearing the magisterial condescension with which the overdraft is granted.'
FREDERICK STREET
Stone Cottage, Breritirioor Road West End, !Ir. Woking
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