Ruth Sunderland

The Co-operative Bank, an ethical lender based in Manchester, has extraordinarily loyal customers. Why, you might wonder, is having loyal customers so extraordinary? Well, in the case of Co-op Bank, you could hardly blame them if they took their accounts elsewhere. The fact so many have stayed put, despite the bank’s spectacular fall from grace, might well have something to do with the paucity of other options on offer. There’s a screaming need for an ethical alternative to the bonus-hungry greed of the mainstream banks, who all too often treat their customers with contempt. Before it ran into the rocks, it seemed as though the Co-op Bank fitted the bill. But then it made the fateful decision in 2009 to embark on a disastrous takeover of the Britannia Building Society.

I don’t normally glean insights for my personal finance columns from police dramas on TV, honest. Recently, though, I caught up with series one of Line of Duty. One of the plotlines explored the middle-class money dilemma of our time: how much a good parent should shell out for their kids. A decent officer was corrupted, not through drink, drugs or gambling, but because he needed money for his daughters’ ruinous private school fees. This is not the kind of thing you can imagine happening to DCI Gene Hunt or Dirty Harry. But then, back in the Life on Mars 1970s, parenting wasn’t even a verb, let alone a competitive sport. School fees were far more affordable and university education was fee-free. There was certainly no such thing as BoMaD, or the Bank of Mum and Dad.

‘Never give up your career for a man.’ These words of my mother’s rang in my ears throughout girlhood, adolescence and young womanhood, until, about a decade into my marriage, she finally accepted I wasn’t going to. The very opposite of an Austen-esque Mrs Bennet, desperate to engineer a good marriage for her daughter, my mother’s belief was that any woman in possession of a brain must be in want of a job. A room of one’s own? Certainly. And a bank account, a pension and some shares. Although I have on occasion mused about how lovely it must be to be supported by a doting husband, my mother, as always, is right. In the past, an advantageous marriage might have been one route for women to live in financial comfort.

If the movie Bonnie and Clyde with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway is on TV again this Christmas, it might act as a reminder that the days when bank robbers used guns and getaway cars have been consigned to history. Nowadays, thieves are armed with broadband, not bullets. They don’t need a getaway car because they don’t even need to be in the same country to clean out the coffers. Online banking is convenient, and often the best interest rates are available on internet accounts only – but it’s also a bonanza for fraudsters. The banks are improving the situation for their customers, but it’s too little, too late. They are desperate to get us all to migrate online, but for their benefit, not ours.

One of the occupational pleasures, and occasional hazards, of being a financial journalist is the need to keep up with your reading. I’ve consumed a stack of books about the financial crisis and its aftermath, including Michael Lewis’s The Big Short and Vicky Ward’s riveting account of the downfall of Lehman Brothers, Devil’s Casino, notable for its portrayal of the designer clad bankers’ WAGs, whose minutely-observed social hierarchy mirrored the ups and downs of their husband’s careers. (At a City dinner a few years ago I sat next to a former Lehman banker who appeared fairly prominently in the book – to my amusement, he was not remotely mortified but boasted loudly about being in it.

‘I’m not loaded, I’m just ordinary,’ protested a wealthy friend of mine, when another chum teased him about his money. ‘Oh yes,’ his tormentor responded wryly, ‘you’re one of those ordinary millionaires, not one of the rich ones.’ It made me smile, and it also made me think. Many of us, like my well-cushioned chum, have a skewed notion of how well off we really are. Most of us probably think we are normal, typical, ordinary, average – but often have little idea what average actually is. When we see headlines about FTSE 100 chief executives earning millions, it makes those of us languishing well below that bracket feel a bit worse about our own income (or is that just me?).

Who do you think is the first woman you would see if you typed ‘CEO’ into the Google Images search bar? Carolyn McCall of EasyJet, perhaps, or how about Angela Ahrends, who used to run Burberry and is now a big noise at Apple? Whoever you guessed, I’m willing to bet you didn’t expect her to be 11.5 inches tall and made of plastic. But when I tried the experiment, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Sixty or so photographs of men – all but one white – flicked up before the first woman boss appeared. And this feminine titan wasn’t an actual human female – she was CEO Barbie. That’s right, the highest ranking woman boss on the planet is, apparently, a doll.

When the baby-boomer generation bought their first homes they were typically in their twenties, took out a 25-year loan, and fully expected to be mortgage-free long before they hit the big Six-Oh. Bring on the cruises and the two-seater sports cars. With an empty nest, no debts to speak of and a final salary pension, life for some really could look like those ads where elegantly greying couples wandered hand-in-hand on the beach. Ha! That was then. Today’s first-time buyers are far more likely still to be paying off a mortgage well into their sixties and possibly beyond. Borrowers are signing up in ever greater numbers to ultra-long term loans of 30 years or even more as a way of being able to afford to buy a first home.

I haven’t taken much notice of International Women’s Day since I flirted with radical feminism as a student, ahem, quite a while ago. But my inner Germaine Greer has been springing into life again due to a survey by recruitment consultants Robert Half marking IWD today. It found men are likely to earn £300,000 more than women over a lifetime, and that’s difficult to dismiss with a dainty shrug. Let’s face it, in most parts of the country, it’s a house. Yes ladies, employers think we are worth a whole three-bedroom-semi less than a bloke. It’s enough to drive a girl to dredge up those Doc Martens and dungarees from the dusty recesses of the wardrobe.