However, let us look back for a moment at the Secondary Banking Crisis.

We have a whirlpool that could eventually turn out to be like Our Secondary Banking Crisis on a world scale.

The Jenkins committee recommended a strengthening of section 190, and investigations following the Recent Secondary Banking Crisis revealed a number of cases where abuses had occurred.

The first is the EEC first Council directive of 12th December 1977, the second is the fashionable preoccupation with consumer protection, and the third is the Secondary Banking Crisis of 1973–74.

The Bank of England has learned much from the Secondary Banking Crisis of 1973–74.

I was not in the House, but I was in the City, during what has become known as the Secondary Banking Crisis.

We have seen from the Secondary Banking Crisis that the system did not work very well because there was not a sufficiently close connection with the Bank as the supervisory authority for the four clearing banks and all the other institutions.

After the Secondary Banking Crisis great efforts were made to ensure that the same could not happen again.

During the Secondary Banking Crisis in 1972–73 I remember a fellow who used to sit near where I am - he is not even in Parliament now because he got mixed up with someone else, Somerset way.

We all know what happened with the Secondary Banking Crisis and with the consortium banks.

Right hon. and hon. Gentlemen on the Opposition Benches and, indeed, the whole House will recall very clearly the Secondary Banking Crisis some 10 years ago and the rescue operations that were mounted by the the then Governor of the Bank of England, backed by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, the right hon. Member for Leeds, East (Mr. Healey).

Does not that candour compare favourably with the cover-up operation which the Labour Government carried out throughout the Secondary Banking Crisis when details of the many bank rescues and lifeboat operations were completely concealed from the House of Commons by the then Ministers?

It took them five years - from the Secondary Banking Crisis of 1974 until 1979-to legislate.

The Chancellor referred yesterday to the Secondary Banking Crisis in an attempt to chide my hon. Friends for not doing enough about it.

It is extraordinary how long the Labour Government took to act in the Secondary Banking Crisis.

It took a Labour Government five years from the onset of the Secondary Banking Crisis and under pressure from the European Community to produce the Banking Act in 1979, which is now recognised to be "totally inadequate", in the words of the hon. Member for Thurrock (Dr. McDonald).

Without doubt, the scandal of the Secondary Banking Crisis in the 1970s was created because of problems of property valuation.

I recollect that in 1973 there was over-reaction to the Secondary Banking Crisis.

If we think of the major problems in the banking sector over the past 15 years or so, we find that the Bank of England has had to rely on the main British clearing banks to rescue banks that failed, first, in the Secondary Banking Crisis of 1974, and again in the Johnson Matthey case.

Let me repeat to the hon. Gentleman that no taxpayers' funds were used in the 1970 lifeboat operation for the Secondary Banking Crisis, or when equity prices fell sharply in the mid-1970s.

The hon. Member for Twickenham rightly used as an analogy the Secondary Banking Crisis in 1974, which required the Treasury to lead the way with a lifeboat-type rescue.

That is the sort of response that the Bank of England and, notably, the present Governor, no less, employed successfully during the Secondary Banking Crisis in 1974 under Denis Healey's Chancellorship.

The question has to be asked: why was Northern Rock not temporarily taken into public ownership - not back into public ownership; it was never in public ownership - as was done in the Secondary Banking Crisis in 1974, in order to avoid a run on the bank and retain depositors' confidence without such a colossal haemorrhage of public funds?

A range of banking collapses have occurred since then - there were a number in the 1970s involving the Secondary Banking Crisis.

Again, doing that was absolutely right, as evidenced by rescue operations in the past - for example, the Bank of England operations in the Secondary Banking Crisis in the 1980s.

I went through the Secondary Banking Crisis in the 1970s as a director of a merchant bank, and I am now on the Treasury Committee, having previously been a Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Treasury.

Then I was a financial journalist: ironically, 30 years ago, writing about the Secondary Banking Crisis for the Daily Telegraph.

The Bank of England found that as it grappled with the Secondary Banking Crisis in the 1970s and later with BCCI and Barings, to name only two.

I came into the City of London in the Secondary Banking Crisis in 1973-74.

I first came to work in the City in 1972 or 1973 during the Secondary Banking Crisis.

Before that, in the early 1970s, when I first came to work in the City, we had the Secondary Banking Crisis.

Johnson Matthey, Barings and, of course, the Secondary Banking Crisis all come to mind.

Memories go back to the early 1970s, when banking licences were given out too easily, and that was a major cause of the Secondary Banking Crisis in 1974.

I am one of the few people still around who participated in the lifeboat back in 1974 in the wake of the Secondary Banking Crisis then.

The Bank of England regulated wholesale markets in those days by applying judgment as well as rules and my experience, as someone appointed to rescue a secondary bank during the 1974-75 Secondary Banking Crisis, gave me the opportunity to see at first hand the effective way in which the Bank of England managed to contain and resolve that crisis.

We also had the Secondary Banking Crisis in 1974.