JACKIE Baillie MSP joins the Archbishop of Canterbury in attacking the wrong target.

While payday loan companies may be a scourge on society, they are flourishing because Parliament and the Bank of England have failed to get the banks lending to British businesses and to the public.

Jackie Baillie and Gemma Doyle forget that it was that eminent Labour politician John McFall (now Rt Hon John McFall, Lord McFall of Alcluith) who presided over the banking fiasco as chairman of the Treasury Select Committee.

The political reaction to the banking crash was to take over HBOS and RBS without any representation on the board of either company, allowing the two banks to continue to act in their own interest and not in the public interest.

Gordon Brown's assertion that the banking crisis was an American import has been long forgotten along with the realisation that Alistair Darling did understand the magnitude of the problem while Gordon Brown and his immediate circle did not.

The next move by Prime Minister Brown and the Bank of England was to increase the reserve requirements of the banks.

Exactly the wrong decision.

The Banks reacted by hoarding cash and stopping lending, and the British economy continues to suffer the consequences of this ill considered action.

Mervyn King (now Mervyn Allister King, Baron King of Lothbury) and the Bank of England have poured �375 billion pounds into the banks in their Quantitative Easing programme.

The government has given the banks 375,000,000,000 pounds to tide them over until the next payday.

That's about �6,000 for every man, woman and child in the country.

You don't see the bankers at the window of your local payday loan company.

They are off in the Bahamas spending their bonuses and counting their pension pots.

Jackie, it was the Labour politicians what done it.

Deal with it, get the banks lending and the payday loan companies will go out of business.

John Black The Scottish Jacobite Party