This certainly isn’t the first poll to show widespread popular support for reigning in the City. It begs the question as to who on earth Labour imagine they are going to win the support of with their pusilannimous attitude to bankers’ greed. Certainly not their core supporters, and by the look of things not the vast majority of mainstream opinion either. The bankers are going to vote Tory regardless, and besides, in case Labour have forgotten, at elections it’s the number of voters who support you that matters, not their combined bank balances.

The credit crunch should have been a gift for the Labour Party. Instead, much like the last time they found themselves in office at the outset of an economic crisis in 1929-31, the party leadership have been trapped by their devotion to right wing orthodoxies just at the point that those orthodoxies are exposed as utterly specious. For Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden it was the primacy of the balanced budget; for Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling it is the canard, brilliantly exposed yesterday in Stewart Lansley’s article, that whatever is good for the City is good for Britain. Whereas MacDonald and Snowden broke with their party and continued to rule in league with the Tories, it seems the current Government are content, as far as Big Finance goes, to continue acting as proxy Tories until we get the real thing back in office next May.