Breaking The Rock

Again.

Who on earth is going to want to buy Northern Rock, at least once their existing shareholders get hold of them? And why on earth is it being turned back into exactly what it was when, and as a result of which, all the trouble happened?

Investment banking and retail banking should be split completely. Furthermore, public ownership took RBS back to profitability, but the Coalition has taken it back into the red. All of the banks should be turned into mutual building societies, ironclad as such by statute. Northern Rock would be an ideal place to start.

Apart, that is, from the public stakes in HBOS and RBS. Those are permanent, non-negotiable safeguards of the Union, as public ownership always is. Therefore, the profits from each of those stakes should be divided equally among all the households in the United Kingdom.

For that, we need a Government which is not so incompetent that it can preside over their degeneration back into loss-making status. Indeed, if this provision had already been in place, then perhaps not even George Osborne would have dared to be quite so stupid and inept as that.