When it comes to taxpayers and nationalization as the only option he can see, I think its way past time he left.
By imposing this unncessary burden on the taxpayers, he is making them take on the risk of keeping this outfit open simply to avoid branch closures. The branches are no doubt full of people, convinced that Labour will save them yet he’s done an 18 month deal on that which happens just to be the time he has left in office on the outside.

Meanwhilew, many Americans are back to living in wigwams again and despite thousands of ordinary folk have been repossessed from their homes, the US and the UK want them to pay for the recovery packages of the very people who made them homeless !!! Staggeringly unbelievable but there it is !!!

So how have others handled this downward spiral in finance ?
Russian premier Vladimir Putin has engaged VEB.
A business loan DIRECT to the business ( not to the bank ), and thereby securing the interests of workers and taxpayers, and its industries which otherwise banks and bailout boys would be picking off by forcing foreclosures on business loans which would otherwise land a certain amount of prizes for foreign bankers when the market returns.

Who’s looking after the interests of workers, jobs, assets, business and the economy better. Is it Putin or Brown ?

If one also wanted to call those people who took out such mortgages idiots or irresponsible then the system was once designed to be almost idiot proof. However, the bankers greed has overridden the idiot proofing system, and bankers prudence vanished on the altar of greed and we are all now just beginning to reap the results.

In reply to “david” 28 Sept 4:31pm, this has nothing to do with demutualisation per se. Ceasing to be a mutual did not give the management of B&B carte blanche to pursue a fundamentally flawed business model.

It is very difficult to avoid “Mike Gill’s” conclusion above that the dying days of the Brown administration is solely concerned with a scorched earth policy designed primarily to buy Brown a day or two of survival at a time, while ensuring that the incoming administration will have both hands tied behind its back for years to come (sorry about the mixed meaphors!). It does, sadly, seem that this approach can be effective in the UK: just look at how many people still bleat about the “damage” caused by the Conservative administration in purging this country of the socialist mess of the 1970’s!

This creeping “nationalisation” is fully in accord with the present administration’s “command and control” approach to every aspect of our lives.

Add in a healthy dose of Liberal Leftie guilt about race and poverty and “working class aspirations” and – bingo! – you have a crisis, because people lend money to people who have neither the ability nor the wish to repay. That is why the whole immoral system comes crashing down like the idol which it is.

(Last paragraph is mine, not His).

I have an idea, that might help to create a better environment for aspiring homeowners. We could set up “banks” where the only people able to receive loans would need to be shareholders too. They would need to be mutually based “societies”, where risk was jointly held along with benefit.

Perhaps we could call them building societies… or something.

Why is this government allowing them to go to a Spanish bank?

The HBOS rescue could still very easily fail, because Lloyds + HBOS are retail deposit short.

The B&B retail deposit base should have been held in reserve to rescue the HBOS bail-out if needed.

Instead, this incompetent Government, has just played its best card to get the headline “B and B has been sold to Santander”.

The media should be reporting this, instead due to economic illiteracy and a left wing bias they parrot the government line.

This incompetence could easily tip England into the abyss.

Once again Socialism led by by, ‘Red George W Bush’ has rushed to the rescue of Capitalism.