Hearts & Minds: What banks can do about the windfall tax

Banks could be hit by a windfall tax in the next budget. Having made substantial profits from quantitative easing, an influential think tank is recommending they should help close the UK’s public funding gap. Their shares took a pounding, but apart from that, there has been little reaction. Certainly, there are not the howls of protest that accompanied the mooted suggestions of Treasury strikes against inheritance tax and property.

The banks need to fight back, but how? Their predicament is not new. The silence should tell them, if they did not know so already, that they are cast in the public and media minds as pantomime villains. The 2008 crisis and its aftermath still rankle. They did not pay a sufficient price then, nor did they apologise. Meanwhile, people suffered. That is how it is popularly viewed. This is their problem: too often they fall back on technical, legalistic and numbers-driven arguments. Citing fairness and getting into the reeds of balance sheets and returns do not wash.

Pointing to figures really does not work in their case. They are seen as so huge - even though they are par for the course globally - as to make them fair game. What they ought to do and where they have been lacking, speaking as someone who has spent decades in newsrooms and witnessed at first-hand how they are regarded, is sell the positive they do, how they help ordinary people and businesses, big and small, the vital role they play, socially and economically. They should connect and relate to day-to-day existence and explain why they matter. They come across as distant and cold. They must speak in language that is easily understood and appreciated, that presents them as having a human face, that does not make them out to be – or allow their opponents to maintain – their sole motivation is always one of profit.

This is also true of the wider City. It fails to show how people’s lives are bound up in its success, how it touches everyone. Instead, the picture that is painted - and goes unchallenged - is one of obsessive money-making and lofty detachment. Save the complicated detail for the private discussions, make the public case around assistance, investment, job creation and wealth generation. In short, do empathy. That essential e-word is too easily forgotten by the banks and City. It is a good place to begin.

Chris Blackhurst is one of the UK’s foremost business journalists. He was previously Editor of The Independent and City Editor of the Evening Standard.