The row over the carve up of Lloyds and RBS is going to rumble on for a fair while yet. But before we all lose interest as we are bombarded with endless tooings and frooings about what could happen and who could buy the banks, it's worth bearing with this one for long enough to get a handle on what it's going to mean for us.

So how will it affect customers and taxpayers?

The idea is to slice and dice the banks, spinning off three 'boring' high street banks from Lloyds, RBS and Northern Rock, focused on doing the traditional current account, savings and loans type of stuff. These three will be flogged to other companies - and there has been plenty of unsubstantiated speculation that Tesco and Virgin may be in the frame.

For customers this means a period of uncertainty. There is a long way to go before anything concrete happens, and the whole process could take four years - by which time a huge number of mortgages and loans will have expired anyway. For those on longer-term deals and with current accounts, it's a case of watching this space for changes to terms and conditions once the sale is complete. On the plus side, new rules mean that you will get plenty of warning before anything happens to affect you.

For everyone else it depends on what the new players decide to offer. If we're lucky enough to get a new consumer-friendly bank then it could force the entire industry to up its game. If we get banks that are committed to new charges and small print, it could be bad news for all of us.

For taxpayers it's just more bad news. Before the great carve up we are going to plough in another £25 billion to prop up Lloyds and RBS, and there's really very little chance the pay-back from the sales is going to be anything more than a drop in the ocean of what we have been forced to pay out. Anyone in the real world is refusing to sell any business at the moment because prices are so low, so selling off the banks right now is considered a way to ensure a terrible price for the deal.

In terms of what the banks do next there will be winners and losers, but if we sell these over-priced giants for buttons we'll all be losers... for generations to come.