by business editor Trevor Sturgess

Some senior bankers should be handcuffed and sent to prison, Andrew Neil said in Kent.

The broadcaster and journalist told delegates at the Kent 2020 Vision conference that bankers were society's new villains and had now joined estate agents and journalists near the bottom of the list of professionals rated lowly by the public.

"I don't want the banks to be regulated to hell," he said. "But I would like to see a few of them suffer. I would like to see the handcuffs on some of them because I think some of them have broken the law and they do deserve to go to jail."

The country should go back to making things, he claimed, like re-engineering the economy and working hard rather than relying on "dodgy financial devices and instruments".