A nation of property owners

toco

Well Gordon Brown if this is true you and your financial advisers have messed up big time.A little sophistication and experience would have ring fenced certain liabilities which clearly should not have been picked up by the UK taxpayer.I trust your advisers' remuneration and bonuses are subject to clawback in the event of future financial losses.

Hawkeye

When are ministers going to learn that the best thing to do with RBS is to sell the good bits and let the rest crash.

We cannot keep shovelling money into the bottomless pit that is RBS

Tankus

why doesn't Gordon do what he did to Iceland ?
Freeze their assets in the UK under the antiterrorism laws ,take back what's owed to the UK , after all , this lot's got beards , so its even more applicable.

Or are these guys to big to bully.

Holly ......

What will the all singing all dancing UKIP/BNP do?
What are Brown & Darling going to do?
What is Osborne going to do?

2trueblue

Toco, we are talking about the same Gordons advisers who got it wrong with Fred the shreds pension, Northern Rocks good assets, to name two? It would appear that we are going to get stuffed again.

I cease to be amazed at the lack of foresight that seems to be prevelant in anything that involves this government. But then we are dealing with a bunch of people who are only capable of small soundbites, and very little follow through.

TomTom

When Scotland collapsed after The Darien Scheme it had to unite with England for financial security; it looks as if Britain might fall into Euroland and a new currency save that the financial liabilities of the UK are too great even for the European Union which needs smaller scale challenges like Greece, Portugal, Bulgaria, Latvia

Geoff Miller

We should take possession of the luxury developments and use them for R&R for our troops and ex-service personnel.

However, somehow I feel that Labour Party apparatchiks may pick a few bargains up; eh Mr Mandelsohn?

After all the Labour Party seems to be ideologically joined at the hip with Mugabe.

R King

This is what you get when you allow former union leaders, shop stewards and CND supporters run the country.

Yarnesfromhorsham

Would enjoy reading the RBS due dilligence report - assuming there was one

Beer Moth

Nice one.

Not only are we, the struggling British workers, landed with paying to keep filthy rich people driving Maseratis around the Home Counties; we now have to sort out how to keep them running from one five star hotel to the next, on the roads of the money soaked Middle East.

Mustn't grumble.

Pete-s

I have always thought the reason Broon and his Scot mates won't let the Scot banks go: is to keep Scotland in the union. When Scotland goes independent there will never be another Labour English parliament.

London Calling

“This is potentially bad news for the UK taxpayer, who faces the prospect of provided further cover for British banks”

And what do the UK taxpayers get in return… sand bags? A free holiday in Abu Dhabi and a bucket and spade thrown in for goodwill?

And this is what we know about now, what else is there to come? The saying ignorance is bliss comes to mind, but when the taxpayers have to pick up the tab
and bail out the banks, incompetence and greed is in bright neon and blinding…

A word that rhymes with Bankers comes to mind…

denis cooper

Unfortunately, "... a bunch of people who are only capable of small soundbites, and very little follow through" could describe the Official Opposition just as accurately as the government.

The businessman James Palumbo alluded to this in an article yesterday:

"The seeds of a possible future disaster were sown during the Blair years ... He played his first term in office with textbook good sense; it was a continuation of Conservative policy to all extents and purposes, with debt kept at record lows. After that, perhaps because the Opposition was so weak, Blair and his Chancellor let rip."

"... the Conservatives accuse the Government of 'not fixing the roof while the sun was shining'. But the problem is they didn't suggest it at the time."

This is just one of the recurrent problems we get through electing the Commons through FPTP: whenever a party achieves a landslide victory, the opposition parties are left too weak to properly oppose it, with capable politicians just as likely to be swept away as the incapable.

My solution would be FPTP-SPTP, putting those candidates who came second in each constituency into a new second chamber with similar powers to the present House of Lords, so (almost) guaranteeing that the government would never have a majority in the second chamber and it could always provide some measure of effective opposition.

chris as usual

These are more toxic assets, to be revalued and written down accordingly, requiring further re-capitalization of our banks, at a cost to the taxpayer.

However, what happens in the UK if a taxpayer fails to keep up payments on their own property loans? They are foreclosed on by the bank who take over the asset.

Why is this any different?

denis cooper

"When Scotland goes independent there will never be another Labour English parliament."

If people in England voted as they did in 1997 and 2001, an English Parliament would certainly be dominated by Labour MPs; if they voted as they did in 2005 then the outcome would be rather less certain, partly depending on the ability of the Boundary Commission to update the constituencies quickly enough to take full account of population movements.

I know some Tories imagine that without Scotland their worn-out useless party could rule in England forever, and characteristically some of them even see that as being a good reason to break up the country; but that's not only a fantasy, it's also an insult to the intelligence of the English.

anne allan

RBS stands for Royal Bank of Scotland - repeat, Scotland. It will be bailed out until kingdom come.
Does this news mean I have a timeshare in Posh'n'Becks little love nest in Dubai?

YA

All that happened becasue of fasle presumption in the West that other cultures know not less than Westerners, what is good for humans.

Which only waited to be materialized by oil and money as universal equivalents of our time.

So the decision to build who-knows-what, who-knows-for-what, following orders of ignorant pajama-clad "aristocracy" - had the same status as the decision to build another nanotechnology lab, or to fund an university, or symponic orchestra, or biotech research center.

But hey wait a mo, - it's nonsense!!
That should stop, no matter how.

So what to do now with all that Middle Eastern camel dung porn barns (and don't forget that is your materialized cultural equality)?

I think one just needs to declare them both deprecated. Just continue to live as they and their presumed value never existed. Debts, what debts?.. all that oil sheiks are nobodies. Do some soul search humans, - and overstep Dubai as you overstep that stuff when you see it on the pavement.

Roy Simpson

R King - "This is what you get when you allow former union leaders, shop stewards and CND supporters run the country."

Can I add social workers and university lecturers?

Marcher Baron

Royal Bank of SCOTLAND and Bank of SCOTLAND - says it all, really. I'm a taxpayer - can I have shares in Nad Al Sheba for my contribution?