I have a piece in today's Times on the bank charges rumpus. Here's an extract:

Let’s say you’re round for dinner one night and you mention that you’re short of cash. There’s a hundred quid on my desk and I'm happy to lend it to you for a couple of weeks. When you nip upstairs to my study, you see that there’s actually two hundred there, so you borrow the lot. You don’t ask me first. You don’t tell me afterwards. You just leave, and spend it.

When I find out, you don’t apologise. You don’t think I have any right to complain. Indeed, you start attacking me – you argue that when I say you can borrow a hundred quid, that means that you can borrow as much as you can find.

Am I the only person who doesn’t even begin to understand the case against the high street bank penalty charges? People who have been given an overdraft limit with an agreed set of terms have simply ignored the limit and carried on spending with money from the bank that they haven’t been given permission to borrow. They have then been charged extra for spending the bank’s money without its agreement. But in the minds of those who are now complaining, it is not they who are at fault but their bank for having the cheek to charge them.

...We would all be so much better off if they showed some backbone, because the banks’ capitulation to their financially profligate customers is going to have a direct and damaging effect on the rest of us. According to comments from the British Bankers’ Association, the next step will be an end to free banking to recoup the money lost from the end of penalty charges on the financially reckless.

So most of us will have to pay a lot more because a few irresponsible customers think they should pay less. What, please, is the point of teaching children to be financially responsible?