Thread: Making the banks and government listen.

Originally Posted by petethemanc

I was sat watching the news and i was thinking. What has happened to us all, we sit and take everything thrown at us and moan about how bad things are and how we get but we never take a stand against it. Surely there must be a way in which we can really hurt them collectively and make them listen. Now i don't proclaim to know all the answers, but for starters if we ALL did not pay our energy bills they would have to listen and if we ALL did not pay our council tax bills they would be forced to listen. What i am saying is we just need ONE person with influence who people will follow, and im pretty sure they would have the the backing of the masses. I served in the army for 16 years, and have seen first hand why we are REALLY there, and the cost of the wars are crippling this country. Surely the money spent there would ease a massive burden on the tax payer. Maybe im rambling on and ranting but i have seriously had enough of the greed in the world today and seeing people struggle and lose homes while the rich get richer. But the question is.....is there anybody to lead us?? sorry if this does not make any sense, but lately i have been doing a lot of thinking it always leads me to the same answer GREED.

Well guys, here goes.

I wrote the following letter today, I'll be interested to see the reply. I wrote it rather in the throes of anger.......been severely pi??ed off by Alliance and Leicesters conduct.

I have recently had Clydesdale Bank for several thousand pounds, I had over £4,000 of work from Thames Water done for nothing, I had a prominent Glasgow lawyer threaten to sue me over my late fathers estate when he was the executor of the will and I have recently had several thousand pounds from a national driving school because they screwed up my livelihood with their incompetence.

What I'm trying to demonstrate is that I don't take no s**t, I'm aggressive, determined and never believe threats made by organisations like banks and lawyers unless they are part of a legal process I can confirm is just that.

I never deal with minions unless they are making me an offer and I always start at the top of an organisation in the belief that if a letter of complaint is passed from a Chief Exec down it's far more likely to be acted on than if it's sent from the tea boy to the office temp.

With that in mind you might get a giggle from this.

Mr Gordon Brown
Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London
SW1A 2AA

24 September 2008

Dear Mr. Brown,

once again I received a letter from my bank, the Alliance and Leicester, informing me of a £25 fee taken from my account described as a “Payment Review Fee” in order that they pay a direct debit of £13.05. There is also a daily “overdraft usage fee” of £.50 and a daily rate of £5 whilst my account is beyond its overdraft limit. Clydesdale Bank recently had a management study exposed that calculated costs amount to no more that £3 - £4 per incident to process; so why am I being charged £270.50 this month (there were also three more charges of £25 made for direct debits whilst over my limit), little wonder they refused to extend my overdraft facility, it’s profit margins pale into insignificance!

I’m not very financially astute so perhaps you can enlighten me as to the interest rate this represents although I could almost guarantee to get a better rate from my local loan shark.

Doubtless you are aware there are several banks currently in court, with the notable exception of Alliance & Leicester, fighting the case of overcharging customers; to my knowledge standard practice since 1976 when I opened my first bank account. Predictably the case is being delayed by legal wrangling which experts think may continue for several years. In the meantime the public that can ill afford to be charged a £25+ fee then £5+ daily for exceeding an overdraft limit are struggling to make ends meet.

I have written to the Alliance and Leicester about overcharging but they merely quote the court case and the delays in its progress, however with no apparent effort they are continuing to overcharge yet incurring no court costs and perfectly willing to accept a favourable outcome. I have also written to the OFT, the FSA and the financial Ombudsman over a period of time but none of them are really interested in the individuals whose interests they are allegedly protecting.

The world’s financial organisations are, once again, being systematically exposed as predatory, badly supervised and dishonest with nothing more than short term, personal profit as their objective and scant official intervention or supervision. Furthermore, in light of the recent Northern Rock rescue, I’m not alone in believing the Government is long overdue in demanding a moratorium on these criminally excessive bank charges.

We have all placed our faith in high street banks with our savings and money management but they have been insidiously and systematically making billions of pounds over many years by plundering their customers accounts and quite evidently mis-using that money.

Thanks to the collaboration between successive Governments and banks and the hysteria over personal security the public no longer have a choice whether they use a bank or not; other than a few credit unions there is no alternative.

In the meantime, personal security is a joke because of the insistence on credit and debit cards which I have personally had ‘cloned’ twice in the past year. I have never had a cheque forged in 32 years yet I don’t know of a supermarket or petrol station in the country that accepts cheques any longer.

Far from being a convenience for the customer, the credit/debit card has become a burden that affects the poorer community members. Millions of people relied on the 3 day cheque clearing period at the end of every month to ensure they could feed their families in the run up to pay day. The virtual abolition of cheques makes exceeding overdraft limits inevitable for most people whilst the banks executives rub their hands at their monthly windfall from illegal charges that officials are ignoring. Consumer organisations are enraged at bank overcharging recognising it for what it is, theft from the poorer members of society; who else goes over their overdraft limit?

This is no longer simply a commercial matter between banks and their customers, Northern Rock eliminated that particular excuse for the Government not to intervene.

Finally, to intimidate/punish anyone who dares defy their system the banks employ the services of credit reference agencies to tarnish the credit worthiness of anyone withholding payment of their illegal charges.

Without recourse to any independent arbitrator on the cause or fault of non payment of an alleged debt, an institution of any type can cause untold hardship to individuals by recording a payment as defaulted. And yet despite the individual paying back everything owed to the claimant, no matter how trivial, the recorded details are kept for 6 years making it almost impossible for people to obtain any meaningful credit.

This abhorrent and manipulative behavior needs to be severely restricted and I sincerely hope your proposed examination of the financial services world will include a clampdown on parasites such as Experian and Equifax.

In light of your much lauded speech yesterday and your appalling decision to abolish the 10% tax rate I hope you recognise this letter as an opportunity to reach almost every member of the population on a personal level.

If ever you had the chance to follow up a speech with action, impress the public and re energise the Labour party demonstrating it as a party for the people, this is it. Please take it.

Yours faithfully,

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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And for the benefit of the forum members I never have been, nor will be a Labour voter in fact I have witheld my vote in national elections over several elections because of the atrocious quality of candidate. I would like to see compulsory voting with an abstaining option to demonstrate to our Government just how dissatisfied most of us are with the continuing general decline of peoples quality of life in this country. But that's another debate.

Lets wait for the reply. It will get read, I wrote to John Major (sounds like I make a habit of this but this is only the second time.....Honest!) in 1990 proposing a radical change to the driving test standard that would reduce road causalities, congestion and pollution forcing people onto public transport which would create the revenue to allow meaningful investment in the system and reduce the burden on the taxpayer.

I got the crappiest letter back from some spotty official who hadn't a clue what I was getting at and I was so angry I tore the letter up, wish I had kept it cos guess what..........Yep 18 years later the Government has just issued a consultation paper called 'learning to drive' claimed to be the most radical change since the 1930's. Considering there has barely been a change since the 1930's that's not difficult but at least they admit that by stating that an examiner from the 1930's could conduct a test today.

I think rather than marching we all ought to do what were good at on this site and write a similar letter each to our PM until his mailbox is very full.

There's only one thing that make the banks and this government sit up and listen.


Dosh. And lots of it.

Other than that, forget it. They couldn't care less if you were starving to death on the streets of London - in fact, given some of the things both of them have done, I would hazard a guess that they would actual welcome that outcome.

Dear Mr Gordon Brown,

I was recently contemplating the following scheme in order to raise some funds for my pension, but given the current ban on "short selling", I was wondering if you could kindly inform me when it would once more be acceptable to implement it ?

I have decided that I will visit my local Rolls Royce garage and "borrow" one of their cars on approval for a week.
Then once I have it my "possession" I then plan to sell it on the open market.
At the end of the week when the car is due back, I will buy it back at the reduced second hand rate, and then simply return it to the garage stating that I no longer wish to have it.
I will then have made a very tidy little profit from having sold the car at market value, but then be able to buy it back at second hand rate.
I know that officially the car would not have been mine to sell in the first instance, and that some may even consider such practice as a confidence trick; but given the governments tolerance of city traders "borrowing" shares, selling them at market value and then buying back at reduced rates before returning to the owner, I cannot see how the law can look upon my proposal any differently, or consider it as unlawful or illegal in any manner?

I look forward to hearing back from you as to when the current ban on short selling has ended, so that I may implement my plan.

Yours sincerely

A. charlatan