Lord Walker did his best to spell out at the outset of the Supreme Court judgement that the Court did not have the task of deciding whether the system of charging personal current account customers adopted by United Kingdom banks is fair, but that of course is no comfort at all to those who believe that banks have committed theft.
For the moment I am most distracted by Lord Walker’s careful gender-inclusiveness, when he wrote that the fairness of the charging system is “an imponderable question which depends partly on whether one’s perception of the average customer who incurs unauthorised overdraft charges is that HE is spendthrift and improvident, or that SHE is disadvantaged and finding it hard to make ends meet. But it is not the question for the Court.” [capitals added for emphasis]
But is it sexist to suggest that the male is spendthrift & the female disadvantaged?
And if so, would it still be sexist if the pronouns were reversed?
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