Putting The Nation Into Nationalisation

"Break Dancing Jesus" has been at it again today, trying to post a truly horrific and utterly deranged comment on yesterday's defence (hardly the first time that I have made it, but there we are) of public ownership as British ownership, and therefore as a bulwark of, if not actually integral to, national sovereignty, so that any true conservative can and must support it.

If this really is, as BDJ would have it, "fascist rubbish" (he has at least managed to spell the f-word correctly this time), then he should take up the matter with Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, rather than with someone who "wants to be a Mulatto Hitler as Mugabe is a Black Hitler" (the capitalisation from violent 1960s race politics is BDJ's own).

BDJ's own virulent opposition to social democratic economics, to moral and social conservatism, and to my specifically Catholic basis (by no means the only one, though, I submit, the most comprehensive and coherent) for holding such views, is exactly the position of Jörg Haider and Austria's German-nationalist third Lager (the mind boggles as to what BDJ will think that that means), of which Haider was not the most famous son.

But anyway, not only national sovereignty, but also the United Kingdom as such, have been significantly secured today. The Bank of Scotland, 1695's definitive break with usury and entry into modern economics, the last institution to have been created by the old Scottish Parliament and to survive down to the present day, the pioneer of overdrafts and bank notes, is today effectively under the control of the British Government.

So too is its great historic rival, the Hanoverian Royal Bank of Scotland, set up to counteract the Bank of Scotland's Jacobitism, a rivalry which long extended to hording each other's notes in order to turn up with them, annually, at each others headquarters, there to demand, as "the bearer", to be paid "on demand the sum" stated on each of them.

The circumstances giving rise to the Union of 1707 have effectively arisen again, and have been addressed in pretty much exactly the same way. Much the same people in Scotland overreached themselves, and that for the very same reason (the desire to be world players), so they have had to be rescued from London, itself acting under the direction of London-based Scots, but with everything that being rescued entails in terms of future control.

And why not? Remember, oh Scotland, that while there is the Union, neither the Bank of Scotland nor the Royal Bank of Scotland will ever go bust, just as you will always have a National Health Service, old age pensions, and all the rest of it. Effective central government control of the Bank of Scotland, and outright central government ownership of the Royal Bank of Scotland, are very clear reminders of that.

More than that, they are constitutional safeguards of it, from today an integral part of the constitutional settlement that is the United Kingdom, a settlement now significantly stronger, safer and more secure than it was even yesterday.

How could any conservative and Unionist be anything other than delighted?