That Mutual Feeling

Even Tessa Jowell talks sense occasionally. She certainly did yesterday, when she called for Northern Rock to be turned back into a locally-based mutual building society. In fact, all of the banks should be turned into mutual building societies, ironclad as such by statute. 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.