Martha Kearney's week

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By Martha Kearney Presenter, BBC Radio 4's World at One

Four of the UK's most powerful bankers apologised but some queried for what?

In the 18th Century there wasn't much tolerance for crooked bankers.

After the South Sea bubble a parliamentary inquiry suggested that the financiers involved be tied up in sacks with poisonous snakes and thrown into the Thames.

I am grateful to the Lib Dems' Vince Cable for that nugget.

He also told me that during the more recent Japanese depression, bankers had to appear on television and bow their heads in an act of contrition.

So perhaps the banking bosses who appeared before the Treasury select committee this week got off lightly.

Apologising for what?

They did apologise but after listening to the full session on Tuesday, I began to wonder what they were sorry for.

"They did give an apology but as the session went on, I think they were drawing back from that and saying, look, there were events beyond our control," John McFall, the committee chair, told me afterwards.

"If you ask my opinion, yes, they were advised to do that. Was there a hint of arrogance still there? Absolutely."

The former and current bosses of HBOS appeared before his committee this week. Friday's news that the troubled bank will face a far bigger losses than predicted in November - around £10bn for the whole of 2008 - shows just how disastrous its business model had been.

Before Christmas I interviewed Sir Victor Blank, the chairman of Lloyds which merged with HBOS.

He defended that decision but when I asked him whether he ever worried that he would go down in history as the chairman of a very good bank which turned it into a bad one, there was a long and telling pause before he replied.

Gordon Brown predicted that the range of measures being taken by the Treasury and Bank of England would lead to greater lending for businesses.

But the HBOS losses shows just how difficult it is for banks to calculate the value of their assets which, in turn, makes finding a solution problematic as we saw from the lack of detail in the Geithner plan in the US.

This has certainly been a difficult week for the prime minister with the resignation of his economic adviser Sir James Crosby from the Financial Services Authority, the Bank of England's gloomy forecast for the economy and unemployment figures nudging two million.

Social tension

It made me anxious this week not just for the state of the economy but about the potential for social unrest given there is so much anger swilling around about the recession.

Community relations are already tense without adding mass unemployment into the mix.

We have already seen the perceived "British jobs for British workers" pledge sparking off a wave of wildcat strikes.

A survey for the BBC's Daily Politics shows that in the 60 council by-elections they've contested since the start of the year, the BNP is getting an average of 14% support and could be on track for a European Parliamentary seat.

Whatever your view of whether he should be allowed into the country, Dutch MP Geert Wilders is clearly attempting to stir feelings of Islamaphobia.

But perhaps that's the way it's always been in this country.

A play I saw at the National Theatre this week "England People Very Nice" depicts a pattern of behaviour over history with waves of immigration into the west end.

Each generation (Huguenots, Irish, Jews, Bengalis) is greeted by prejudice and frequently violence before eventual assimilation.

The play even recalls a bombing on the underground at the turn of the century at Aldersgate tube (sic) but that time it was a Russian anarchist.

Shades of Conrad's The Secret Agent.

Different debris

But one item on the programme this week made me realise that some people have even more pressing problems than the economy.

After the crash of two satellites in space, I interviewed the head of space debris at the European Space Agency.

He has two satellites in the same orbit and has to prevent them from crashing because of the clouds of debris which have appeared.

Would you rather have his job or head of the Financial Services Authority?