Are bankers alone to blame for our plight?

I am watching these four bankers before the treasury select committee in the Commons. And I am watching our elected representatives struggling to rise to what is expected of them.

The MPs are manifestly under-briefed in comparison with their American counterparts, who have large teams working on a thing like this. Our representatives have the House of Commons library, Google, and perhaps a couple of bright graduates.

The bankers, meanwhile, are said to have been given extensive media coaching ahead of what may prove to be the one and only moment they are ever called to account.

Our instinct may be to render these four guys (two knights, a lord, and a commoner) the fall guys for the collapse of the British banking system in the aftermath of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in New York.

But does not responsibility extend far beyond them, to the directors, the shareholders, the regulators and, of course, the government – and ultimately the opposition parties, too? Few among their number blew the whistle on the massive risks to which our own collective welfare was subjected by the gambling that was going on inside the financial system.

The fact is that the sheer scale of what went wrong is so big and so wide-ranging that pinning it on the guys at the top of the pile merely sates an animal instinct to see someone pay. But these chaps will not be paying. Indeed, at least one of them is still drawing £60,000 a month from the very bank he helped bring to the edge of collapse.

The bankers were sent for by the treasury select committee, and therefore had little choice but to attend. But halfway through today’s hearing we are getting nowhere. And it has taken months to reach where we are today.