Blog: Anyone who has ever found a fiver in the pocket of their best jacket at a wedding will know the joy an unexpected wee lump of cash can bring, writes business editor Thom Kennedy.

Whether it’s another round of drinks at the bar or a bag of sweets in the car on the way home, finding that lost dosh, however meagre it may be, feels like a joyous windfall – like you’ve got something for nothing and finally got one over whoever it is that seems to siphon all that cash out of your bank account. (Father Christmas? Easter Bunny? It has to be somebody.)

So the thought of everyone in the country effectively being given £1,000-worth of shares in two of the nation’s biggest banks sounds, on the face of it, like a fantastic windfall, and an excuse to dust off the passport and start looking at hotel prices in the Seychelles.

Now, Liberal Democrat MP Stephen Williams has stood up and put his name to just such a proposal, advocating plans by city firm Portman Capital to privatise the part-nationalised banks Lloyds TSB and the Royal Bank of Scotland by handing out most of the State’s shareholdings to 45 million people listed on the electoral roll.

You would hold the shares until they acquired enough value to pay the government back the value of its investment, and when you chose to sell them, you could keep the extra value they have acquired on top of that.

So far, so very generous. Benevolence isn’t a word many people would associate with the current coalition, but this seems like a good way of helping people out with a bit of extra cash when they might need it.

The trouble is, the likelihood of the banks ever reaching a point where the share value becomes high enough to allow people to make any decent money from their sale looks like it’s a way off.

Naturally enough, once the share price gets high enough to make the shares worth selling, everyone will sell, dumping the value of the shares back into the doldrums. When you have 45 million people with itchy trigger fingers waiting for a good share price to crop up, it could be years before that scenario happens at all, and even longer before the shares have a consistently high value.

This isn’t a criticism of the proposals, let’s make that clear. It’s great to see a scheme thrown out there that doesn’t feel like a body blow to public services, that doesn’t involve the phrase ‘we’re all in this together’.

But the Treasury said it welcomed the idea as an “interesting contribution”, which, were I a less generous man, I might consider to be something of a pat on the head to Portman Capital. It’s like a child asking for an ice-cream just before dinner is an ‘interesting contribution’ to the debate over the timing of domestic eating habits.

So much as it’s a nice idea, let’s put it this way: hotels in the Seychelles can probably save themselves the bother of taking on any extra staff to head of a bookings boom. For the next few years at least.