Straight from the hip with Jeannie Johnson

You may not think there is any similarity between the coal mining industry just after World War II and the banking industry now, but there is.

It's got nothing to do with pit ponies or hacking into a coal face – or in the case of bankers, into a computer, the only hacking they're ever likely to do.

One big thing connects the two – nationalisation, or, to put it another way, take the money and run!

An old friend, a native of the village of Radstock, told me what happened there when the coal mines were nationalised and the National Coal Board was created.

Radstock was a mining village where the tail end of the Welsh coal seams had been mined for decades. It was hardly the biggest mine and certainly not the most profitable. According to my old friend, the trucks, the donkey engines and the pithead wheels were worn out and the wooden props holding up the ceilings were definitely dodgy.

The mine office, he recalled, was a grim place where the paint was peeling and the height of technology was a ballpoint pen and a notepad. Basically, the whole place was run on a shoestring and it showed.

Then came nationalisation. Everything changed overnight, no expense was spared.

The wormy old pit props were replaced with brand new ones. The tired old equipment with its squeaky wheels and stiff gearboxes was cut up and sold for scrap. The pit ponies were put out to pasture (I presume). In came shiny new equipment, stuff that was state-of-the- art technology for the time could now be afforded because the Government – or to put it more precisely, the jolly old taxpayer – was footing the bill.

Surprise, surprise, the office was the first to get a lick of paint, the first for many a long year – probably since it was built by a dour-faced Victorian bricklayer.

Typewriters replaced the ballpoint pens. As Government departments require everything in triplicate and letterheads with legible words, a typewriter had to be purchased. More than one, in fact. Perhaps six, just in case one broke down. And hey, why not? The taxpayer can afford it.

The mine owners did very nicely out of the deal, of course, just like the bankers. It doesn't matter if they'd been running a shambles of an operation for years and got away with it. The Government has no concept of running a business – why should it? Running the country is a full-time job and they have civil servants who've been doing it for years to help them.

Not that the civil servants know how to run a business, either. All they know is that stuff costs money. So that's what they do – they throw money at it.

Money means improvements, as in the case of the old Radstock mine. But it didn't last, of course. Coal went out of fashion and the seam was a minnow compared to the Welsh mines.

The Government's input of taxpayers' money was written off – you can do this in a nationalised industry. In the meantime, those who used to run the business bought a bungalow in Bournemouth. In the case of the banks, it's probably a penthouse in Bermuda. They've had a very good payout, and when the time comes for banks to be re-floated as private concerns, they'll have the money to buy them back. At a knock-down rate, of course.

I hear Post Office workers were mooting the idea of a people's bank. Wasn't there once a Government-owned people's bank? Wasn't it called the Trustee Savings Bank – the TSB – the bank that liked to say "yes", as in their old advert? Obviously they said yes to Lloyds, who bought it at a knock down price from the Government – or, rather, us.