Between a Rock and a hard place
James Forsyth 8:54am
Rachel Sylvester has a typically eloquent and perceptive piece on the political ramifications of nationalising Northern Rock in the Telegraph today. As Sylvester points out the government has to come up with a solution before the end of February when the six month period for state aid mandated by the European Union runs out.
The problem isn’t so much nationalisation per se but the fact that it was so clearly the government’s least preferred option. Reading Hansard one is struck by the venom with which the Liberal Democrats were attacked for first floating the idea. The political effect in the North East is going to be magnified by the fact that it was local MPs such as Jim Cousins who led the charge against it.
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Scunner
January 15th, 2008 9:36amMay I compliment you on the least original headline in the history of the media.
David Lindsay
January 15th, 2008 3:35pmThe Lib Dems have made extravagant predictions in the past about a number of seats in the North East, including Cousins's. They've never been able to deliver, because in this part of the country they are the party of municipal class war against the workers and the public sector. In Newcastle, they are currently engaged in a sort of ethnic cleansing of the working classes out of their own marginal or target wards. If a London Borough were doing it, then it would be front page news. If Northern Rock can be nationalised, then so should be the rip-off utilities and public transport network, increasingly owned from abroad while Britain laughably purports to be a sovereign state under such circumstances. But of that, no doubt, another time. As the old Clause IV:iv might have put it, “the most equitable” and “the best obtainable” form of “the common ownership” of Northern Rock would be as the locally-based mutual building society back into which the Government should turn it as soon as possible after a purely preliminary and transitional nationalisation.