Bankers ‘should have been jailed’

Rogue bankers responsible for the 2008 crash should be locked up, says Gordon Brown.

The ex-prime minister, who has been widely criticised for not regulating the City tightly enough as Chancellor, said the lack of proper punishment makes it “inevitable” history will repeat itself.

In his memoirs My Life, Our Times, he also recounted his first meeting with Fred Goodwin in the 1990s, when the shamed former RBS boss was an accountant involved in privatising Rosyth dockyard in Fife.

“If bankers who act fraudulently are not put in jail with their bonuses returned, assets confiscated and banned from future practice, we will only give a green light to similar risk-laden behaviour in new forms,” he wrote.

As well as his knighthood, the former Fife MP said Mr Goodwin should have been stripped of his bonuses.

He said: “By the time the bank collapsed he had from his company a private suite in the Savoy costing £700,000 a year, a fleet of 12 chauffeur-driven Mercedes limousines with RBS emblazoned all over them, and he regularly used a private jet at the weekend – whether for boar hunting in Spain or following the glamorous F1 circuit around the world.”

Mr Goodwin was in charge of RBS when it racked up hundreds of billions of pounds of debt in a series of toxic deals, leading to the taxpayer stepping in to bail out the bank.