HOMES- NOT DEBT

It's reported today that Northern Rock is to offer offer up to £14bn extra in new mortgages over the next two years to help kick-start the ailing housing market.
Would it not be more to the point for semi-nationalised concerns to start working with the Government to addres the real crisis we face in social housing for rent? At a time when job securioy and the ability to save deposits for mortgages are both utterly skwed by the state of the economy, surely it's the moment to take back the housing agenda and turn it into an electoral positive.

NATIONALISATION WITHOUT COMPENSATION......

The above used to be the rallying cry of the Left. Read this below from The Times and you may see why............Mr Applegarth's pension BTW is worth an alleged £2million.......

Northern Rock is giving disgraced former chief executive Adam Applegarth a £760,000 pay-off, a £346,000 pension top-up and continuing to honour his cut-price staff mortgage.
The pay-off is much larger than the sum foreshadowed in December, when sources close to the bank insisted Mr Applegarth would get less than six months' pay.
Rock revealed today that it had plunged to a £167.6 million loss last year, compared with a profit of £627 million in 2006, because of the exceptional costs of the strategic review and write-offs on mortgages and unsecured loans.
New chairman Ron Sandler also warned that he expected the bank to continue to make losses for the next three years before breaking even in 2011.

JOB LOSSES AT NORTHERN ROCK

It seems extraordinary that the Government has already allowed Northern Rock to become another "lame duck"nationalisation. The loss of 2,000 jobs is justified by management on the grounds it will enable NR to pay back loans from the Government and then return to - the provate sector. Maybe I'm being naive but surely it would make more sense to try and make it a going concern and empower - not sack - those who work for it. It would also have helped if most of the assets hadn't been siphoned off of course.....

GRANITE ISSUE WON'T GO AWAY....

It's quite extraordinary how the media airbrushes the Labour left out of the equation when it comes to coverage of key issues. Having made this the subject of my General Studies A Level essay 30 years ago i suppose I should no longer be surprised. But here we are again. Vince Cable may have got the credit from the BBC but the gaping £40billion Granite hole in the Northern Rock nationalisation was actually uncovered in the Commons the other day by John McDonnell MP. The details of the Hansard debate ( nothing more objective than Hansard...) are on Union Futures. John has now gone on to explain why the Granite issue is so important and it now looks likely it will be investigated further as the Lords have demanded key amendments to the nationalisation legislation.

NORTHERN ROCK NATIONALISED!

Comrades, come rally. Can scarcely believe this but Telegraph is reporting that Northern Rock has been taken into public ownership after the high-profile Virgin bid was judged to be "out of the ballpark" in terms of value to the taxpayer.
Apparently, in an "acrimonious "conversation this afternoon with Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson, Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, broke the news that the entrepreneur's demands were impossible for the Government to accept.
As late as Saturday, Mr Darling and the Prime Minister had hoped a private-sector deal to rescue the troubled bank could still be achieved without compromising public funds. But by Sunday morning, it came apparent that Sir Richard's offer, and a second bid from the Rock's board, the only deals still on the table, involved far too great a public subsidy, with limited returns to the taxpayer.The announcement that Northern Rock would, despite Gordon Brown's increasingly desperate efforts to secure a private sector deal, be nationalised after all came after a weekend of hurried phone calls, cancelled holidays and rushed meetings. About, er , bloody time.......The bad news ,of course, is that the nationalisation is only "temporary."

NATIONALISATION IS NOT A FOUR-LETTER WORD

So. Gordon Brown is so scared of the N-word that he is opting for a deal which is likely to seriously annoy taxpayers. Well done. Apparently, he's cooked up some deal with his China travelling companion Richard Branson which will mean US having to subsidise the Bearded One's plans for ( you guessed it) Virgin Bank.
According to today's Telegraph Brown has sanctioned the deal, which will see the taxpayers' debt "parcelled up" and sold to institutional investors, repayable over a number of years, in an attempt to avoid the "political stigma "of having to nationalise a bank.The Government will underwrite the debts and Virgin is the front-runner
Branson says he has a "winnable" bid and that he will rebrand the lender Virgin Bank.
It is ludicrous and a disgrace that Brown's Thatcherite faith in free markets is allowing him to play silly buggers with billions of pounds of taxpayers' money. Even the extremely moderate Steve Richards, of the Independent, agrees with me!
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article3356208.eceney. And Branson can't lose...

WELL SAID SEUMAS .....

Newsnight was claiming the other day that Chancellor Alistair Darling was getting seriously hacked off with Gordon Brown's dithering over the nationalisation of Northern Rock. Darling, as befits an alleged former member of the Militant tendency, had no such qualms. Now it looks as though the Govt will finally have to concede public ownership is the only answer. Which drew my attention to an excellent piece by Seumas Milne in today's Guardian > Here's an extract but I recommend reading the whole thing on CiF.....

"The Northern Rock implosion has highlighted the real nature of what's called the free market in modern capitalist economies - neither free nor transparent, and utterly dependent on state support. As the fallout from what shows every sign of becoming a wider economic crisis becomes clearer, demands for alternatives are certain to grow. Bemoaning what he calls "the rise of state capitalism", the Yale professor of trade and finance Jeffrey Garten this week declared that "the era of free markets unleashed by Margaret Thatcher and reinforced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s is fading away". He's right, but politicians and the media have yet to catch up."

MANIC MONDAYS

Basically, Monday is now a pretty difficult day for blogging as from 7.30am till 7pm am away from home and teaching/travelling to and from work at a local university. Anyway inspiration not exactly in full flow as am now completely knackered. Interestingly , though, looks as though Northern Rock may be nationalised after all following the pull-out of a major private equity company and concern over the viability of Virgin. The Bank Of England and the Treasury it seems are now more or less on side so isn't it time the Government bit the bullet and went for this eminently sensible, not ideological solution.
Meanwhile, things have gone pretty quiet on the trade union link furore which probably means Brown is aiming for deals behind doors when he gets back from the Middle East . The union leaders must NOT be allowed to get away with another beer and sandwiches stitch-up. And hey , even Luke Akehurst supports us on this one........

BRANSON'S BID ACCEPTED BY GOVT

Optimistic as ever , I have just joined a Facebook campaign group to Nationalise Northern Rock. But it looks as though the £900-plus of my money as a taxpayer which has already been ploughed into it will now be appropriated by Richard Branson and eventually make a nice fat proft for both Branson his shareholders. The Government has just confirmed it will back his bid to absorb Northern Rock into "Virgin Money." What a woeful lack of radical imagination on the Govt's part. And a woeful waste of public money....

NORTHERN ROCK MUST BE NATIONALISED..

Strange old world when the Liberal Democrats are calling for nationalisation but there you have it. The view is one also shared by rabid "lefties" like Will Hutton. But it's clear Brown's stubborn attitude and ideological opposition to anything remotely " socialist" will resist this one all the way. Would be good to see Jon Trickett putting his money where his mouth is and joining in a Labour campaign for what is basically a common sense solution to safeguard taxpayers. With Brown hitting all-time lows in the personal ratings, you would think he would listen to reason....as Darling is just his puppet, highly unlikely.

BUDDY, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME.......

Chancellor Alistair Darling resolutely upbeat this morning on Today despite the crisis over at Northern Rock.Let's hope he is right. Would the Government, as Will Hutton suggested, take the logical step of nationalising it in a worst-case scenario? One thing's for sure. The mood music in the media about snap general elections has already changed. It's suggested by the Guardian that pictures of anxious savers queuing to get their money out wouldn't exactly be helpful to our victory prospects. Indeed. And interesting, if a tad scary, to note just how quickly the apparent invincibility of the capitalist world can start to crack.

In 1929, the Wall Street Crash had terrible repercussions for the nation, despite the fact that less than one per cent of the American people actually possessed stocks and shares. The fall in share prices over just a few weeks made it difficult for entrepreneurs to raise the money needed to run their companies. Within a short time, 100,000 American companies were forced to close and many workers became unemployed. It was the start of the Great Depression. We're a long way from that. But it's a salutary lesson for companies like Northern Rock, where shares have fallen a horrific 50 per cent in just a few days