Start the season early with the banks in your sights

Forget grouse shooting in the Highlands on the glorious 12th (of August). Taking pot shots at the banking behemoths in the first weeks of February is a much better sport.

This year will prove to be an exceptional vintage. Take aim ... fire. You can't miss. Especially when they are expected to report profits of £30bn - and much of that at our expense. There could even be fireworks. By which I mean a few placarded figures strolling outside your local branch telling passers by their bank is the pits (as told by Sean Coughlan on page 60).

If bank bosses weren't so colourless and staid, there might have been a demand for dart boards and archery targets adorned with a mugshot of Royal Bank of Scotland boss Fred the Shred (real name Fred Goodwin), if only because he can claim the best nickname.

Yet this is a serious business. Mr Goodwin is expected to announce profits of £8bn for 2004 in a couple of weeks for the combined RBS/ NatWest group. He will be preceded by John Varley at Barclays who is expected to push up profits at his bank by almost a quarter to £4.7bn.

We can expect some people to hail these profits as examples of fantastic management and healthy corporate Britain. What more pleasing sight, they argue, than the warm security of bumper profits and solid dividend payments, which in turn are the bedrock of all our pension funds.

But these are meagre rewards for the privilege of paying extortionate charges and fees for overdrafts and worse for unauthorised overdrafts (as highlighted by Richard Colbey on page 11). Then there are the millions of people without pensions, who are more likely poorer, who pay the bulk of these charges.

There are parliamentary committees telling the banks they are wrong to overcharge for this or that service.

This week the Treasury select committee gave the banks and credit card companies a roasting for the charges on late payment of credit card bills and how they calculate their interest rates.

While the banks probably don't enjoy all the attacks on their business from MPs and publications such as Which?, they can handle it. They are now so big these attacks are more like pinpricks. Banks like RBS, Halifax and Lloyds TSB make money from fleecing the likes of you and me. And good management? Surely they are just reaping the benefits of a stable economy. I say no more committees. Let's go hunting, with the banks in our sights. And bag 'em with a windfall tax.