Mr. Abu Bakr may not be 100% right about Britain being a police state but the legislation that is meant to keep terrorists and other baddies from moving their ill-gotten gains around doesn't half get your goat.

I've earlier mentioned my difficulty in opening a savings account. It's got worse. They have now asked me for documents which for perfectly good reasons I can't provide. Either a personal cheque drawn on an account in my name with another UK bank. Why would I have another current account in the UK? Isn't that more a money launderer's trick. Or a tax document for the current or the next tax year that matches my application details. Well I haven't got around to telling them that I'm here yet so those documents have a Manchester address which is not one of the addresses in my application.

So to review the situation. I cannot transfer a small amount of money which they are holding in one of their piggie-banks into another of their piggie-banks. This from the bank where I have had an account for over 40 years, a bank where I was once an employee, a bank who lent me money to buy a house and, the final irony, a bank that rang me a couple of months ago when I temporarily had a largeish sum in my account and asked if I'd like them to transfer it into a savings account.

Of course if you complain they shrug their shoulders and say that they don't make the rules, they just apply them. What a pity they weren't drafted in to look after the pallets of 100 dollar bills sent to Iraq.