Our government which props up half our banks on our money and companies like G4S has now sold, on our behalf, 632 Lloyds Bank banks to the Co-Op bank for peanuts. Co-op apparently paying £350M up front and another £400M over the next 15 years in preference to another offer of £800M upfront and more over a shorter time period than the Co-Op offer. So, we prop up the bank and then we subsidise it's sale (and so lose more) to a Co-Operative organisation. I cannot work out whether this is communism or reverse communism or just plain insanity. Can someone explain it to me?

You have a weird sense of what communism is.

He has no sense of what communism is.

Have you though?

Yes.

I think its an ace deal to an ace company, in fact yesterday when I heard the news I applied to open an account with the Co-op (yes really), like all banks though they tend to hide the fact that you really don't have to pay for their current accounts which I was a bit disappointed with.

Anyway - I buy my gas and electric from the co-op now, and will be banking some of my income with them too, shortly.


I'm a right commie bas'tad me.

Same here, a couple of months ago I moved all my accounts away from the Halifax to the Co-op and Skipton Building Society.
Halifax closed down my 2 nearest branches, c0cked up a previous transfer to one of their pay accounts, massively raised the interest on my credit card, stopped my debit card while I was away on holiday despite having told them where I was going, and just generally been sh|t and unhelpful.
So I thought I'd let my socialist instincts take over for a change.

Oh, I love this one!

We had something similar happen some years ago. They then told us that we should have been telling them when we went to Furrin Land.

We said they'd never told us we had to tell them.

They said that they couldn't send out letter because those letter might have been intercepted.



You could not make it.

We are no longer with the Halifax. We moved to the Nationwide (a mutual) where our mortgage is.

Let me think now ... which banks would I trust?
Mutuals of course.

But, of course, in your book, Mutual = Communist.

Dally is right the sooner the government is voted out the better. Lets have an election soon and we can remove this hopeless Coalition and bring back in a Labour government.

I haven't, so can you please provide me with a brief explanation so that I do not make silly comments on the subject in future?

Thanks.

Probably be easier if you just didn't comment on anything.

I think you missed my point entirely. We had a largely publicy owned bank, which has been 'given' away on the cheap to some form of mutual organisation. So, the general public lose out (for the second time) in favour of the members of the Co-Op.

Incidentally, the co-op bank is not very good. My partner has been shouting at them all week for taking money from a bank account and then providing him with false informatio on the matter; my wife keeps the records of a charity and they asked for information unnecessarily (and back-tracked when challenged) and I have a credit card and have had words them in the past for pointlessly blocking transactions. Accordingly, I very rarely use the card because I can never trust them to honour transactions. They are my only 3 experiences of them and so as you can imagine I am not impressed!

I stand corrected *tips hat*

In the Which? survey of customer satisfaction, the Co-op's Smile online bank came second (89%) and the Co-op Bank came third (86%).
But we can't believe them, can we, they only had sample sizes of 570 and 604, so let's just go by what you say.
I mean, you were spot on with NHS satisfaction rates.


p.s. First place went to First Direct (93%), whilst Lloyds trailed way back with 58%.

Do you ever have any successful and satisfactory dealings with [ianyone[/i Mr. Dallington?

He's always been 100% satisfied with the Daily Mail.

Had some excellent dealings with the RFL on a couple of occasions.

The account holders transferring from Lloyds will become part-owners of the Co-op Bank.

Speaking as an ex-Halifax customer myself, who voted (in the minority) against de-mutualisation, if I had remained with the Halifax (and thence into Lloyds), I think I'd be pleased to be going back to a mutual.
It does seem a bit crap though that these people were paid-out for their share of the Halifax and are now (it would appear) getting a share of another mutual for nowt.

Those members of the Co-op being in the main .... ?

The general public ???

I love reading Dally's total misunderstanding of anything left wing and political.

I'm still chuckling at his assertion that Marxism = Leninism the other week. That was the point that it suddenly became obvious that he had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

Pssst! Shall we mention anarcho-syndicalism in his presence?

Or a subset thereof?

Always makes he laugh that there's a whole, albeit small,group of deluded people out there who like to try to intellectualise over theoretical nuances of theoretical socialism / communism and spend huge portions of the life pretending to "fight" for some imaginary cause / imminent revolution! They are just stupid. Often teachers and people with beards. None of them have ever considered what real life would be if their fantasies became reality. Some of the saddest people you could ever meet. Might adopt one as a pet.

It's bloody ridiculous isn't it! We both told them we'd be going to Philadelphia, Washington DC and New York and probably a couple of places in between. It was fine in Philly & DC, then it must have been the stops in Lancaster & Gettysburg that did it. Though despite us both making purchases on our cards, only mine got stopped. You'd also have thought the person making the decision could have looked at a map and seen Gettysburg is in between DC and New York!
It really annoyed me because we were running short of cash and I could've done with my debit card! Especially for the flight home which turned into a disaster, needless to say US Airways have joined Halifax, Reel Cinemas and York City Council on my sh|t list.