Obviously it’s idiotic threatening to blow up a bank. But how I feel the pain of the Lloyds online customer who did!

Pranking about bombs is wrong and stupid: of course it is. Use the B‑word lightly and authority clamps down hard (i once saw a man led off to be stripsearched at Boston airport after a stupid joke about something which, he said, had ‘bombed’).

But 44‑year‑old Dean Prescott from Hindley in greater Manchester got into a temper one day when he was on the wrong side of some lager, an anti‑anxiety drug and a struggle with his bank’s website — and rang 999, threatening to blow up Lloyds.

He was traced, arrested, charged with malicious communication and given a suspended sentence. He also got a stern talking‑to from Judge Thomas gilbart about wasting police time.

Quite right, too. But, oh, how my heart rose when His Honour on the bench admitted, without actually sympathising, that ‘ frustration at internet banking is perhaps a daily occurrence for many people’.

Say it for all of us, Judge! The ones who really deserve a sharp word are the vast, fatly profitable banking groups who trim their work and costs by loading as much of it onto us as they can.

They close branches, pare down staff in favour of iT, automation and delay. ( Even as i write these words, i am

When the black horse ads come on, I swear at the TV

listening to waiting‑Muzak on my phone because of a problem with my Visa card.) Mr Prescott may have wasted police time, but like the rest of us he is not supposed to mind having his own time wasted by banking giants richer than he is.

Here was a family man in times of precarious anxiety, just trying to check his account. Like everyone these days, he was using equipment, wifi and power he paid for to check on his own money, because his local branch had shut down in 2019 and the nearest was apparently three miles away at Westhoughton. actually, looking it up, i notice that this one also closed last year, so god knows where he goes now.

These closures are part of a massive erosion of face‑to‑face local banking. in the five years leading up to the loss of Mr Prescott’s bank, a third of all High Street branches shut their doors. More close every year: another 193 are planned to go in 2023.

Lloyds is not even the worst offender — that’s the natWest group — but whenever its expensive galloping blackhorse adverts come on at the cinema or on TV, with a Calvin Harris anthem and a murmur that Lloyds is ‘always by your side’, i mutter: ‘ no you’re b****y not!’ Sometimes aloud. Sorry, everyone.

The reason given for all these closures, of course, is that online banking has taken off. i get that: i was an early adopter of phone banking when First Direct started, and when wifi speeded up i started to use websites for one work account, one personal one and a shared family one. i am used to computers, i live somewhere with good wifi (plenty of people don’t), and i can remember Pins.

i am organised enough not to lose the weird plastic gizmos banks send — and so far none has been eaten by the dog, though it has been a near thing. resentment did rise when my main account pretty much ordered me to have a phone app, because i hate how dependent the smartphone makes me.

But i can cope — and admit that when i ring up and finally get through, the young callcentre people are usually helpful, and after ten minutes more Muzak they can sometimes get me through to the Visa department. But even for a tech‑accustomed person who is mostly at home, like me, it’s wearing.

We do have one branch 15 miles away, where they are only too pleased to help: probably because they fear being shut down any minute. When they are axed, it’ll be a 50‑mile run. and i don’t know what will happen to fellow‑queuers i meet, small businesses that still take cash (banks have driven many others to tap‑only deals, which upsets their most elderly customers no end).

Small cafes and shops bank their takings as often as they can for safety: a fifth of small businesses with a turnover under £2 million use branches, and ever more have to use their own time and petrol to do so.

a lot of little towns, such as Sandbach in Cheshire, haven’t a single branch left; ten per cent of the rural population now live at least ten miles from a bank counter, and the Financial Conduct authority has raised concerns that this increases financial exclusion of the vulnerable.

Yuppies may scoff, but in a time of squeezed budgets, some poorer families use cash as a way of budgeting: it’s something visible that you can watch ebbing away and be aware of.

Unfashionable perhaps, but when you’re near the breadline it can work. and some payments are made with cheques — and if you can’t use one at a branch counter, there’s a costly first‑class stamp to buy.

But the banks in their towering City headquarters don’t care. They are more than happy to hang on to our money, invest it and make more money from it to swell their bonuses while paying out absurdly small interest or none.

They like brokering big deals with us, ideally online, for loans or mortgages when there’s a good profit in it for them, but they would prefer never to see us in person. They don’t want to face us across some oldfashioned walnut desk, or see it as their duty to represent the solid responsibility of finance in a quiet, dignified space, with assistants to reassure or advise the nervous, aged, anxious and those who struggle with numbers.

rather than hire agreeable, helpful, public‑facing people, they prefer consultants, ad agencies, reputation managers and iT wizards who can write vapid, unhelpful texts for futile online chatbots.

The erosion of the dignity and convenience of High Street banking not only irritates many customers and excludes others: the pressure to do everything online or by phone is a tremendous boon to scammers.

Of course we all ought to be careful of scams — but when citizens of every level of ability and sophistication are forced to do their finances through screens and phones, life is gloriously easy for the cunning, plausible evil individuals in the scamming trade.

The victims are ever less able to drop into a branch, or ring its direct number, to ask, ‘is it you saying my card is compromised?’ or, ‘Look, i’m not sure about this weird email bill.’

For their profit and convenience, massive banking groups are cutting us off from solid reality and a safe, sane sense of money. The government line, by the way, is that these are ‘commercial decisions’ and not their business. But then, they do have a lot of friends up those City towers.

Banks would like never to see us in person