Bankers – not ex-MPs – should be in the dock

Surely I am not the only person who finds it rather puzzling, indeed utterly perverse, to observe three Labour MPs and a Tory peer being hauled before the courts at taxpayers' expense to answer allegations of what, in the wider scheme of things, are minor financial irregularities, while, in complete contrast, the mainly Edinburgh-based bankers who have cost every taxpayer on average £5,000 are pardoned with a grudgingly confessed "sorry".

With our money being used so liberally to prop up the failed banks, taxpayers should have the right to know why those banks succumbed to massive losses, while others operating in the same economic environment absorbed their losses and traded normally.

Whose decisions provoked those losses, why were they taken and for whose immediate benefit?

Until these questions are addressed (in a courtroom, if necessary), taxpayers will rightly conclude their money is being used to cover up a multitude of sins in the banking sector.

In what other situation could one personally envisage handing over 5,000 with no questions asked to complete strangers to reimburse their losses in a business that was technically bankrupt? That is what we've done as a nation, and we'll eventually get what's coming to us in the banking crisis part II.

Do we really wish our law- enforcing and legal professions to be engaged investigating parliamentarians' piggy-banks while billions have disappeared without trace, lost for ever on dodgy deals in a financial fairyland?

IAIN M MACDONALD

Miavaig

Isle of Lewis

I was disappointed by the attitude to justice displayed by some of your correspondents (Letters, 14 April).

Whatever the ex-MPs may or may not have done, it is fundamental to our system of justice that a man is considered innocent until proven guilty and that he is entitled to the best possible defence.

If legal aid is required, then so be it. To complain at the possible cost of justice is wrong; one may question the fees of the lawyers that raise the cost so high, but justice is the handmaid of freedom and we should not set bounds on its cost.

If we ignorantly undermine our system of law and justice, there is nothing between us and the mob at the door with burning torches and pitchforks.

SCOTT McINTOSH

Allanfield

Edinburgh