Nationalise away!

Also on Comment is Free, Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayer's Alliance says taxpayers should not have to bail out banks. As the standfirst puts it (I can't be bothered to read the article)

There is no reason why wholesale nationalisation should be the outcome of the current economic turmoil

Well, he's right on the first point, but if we are giving them our money, we should nationalise them. At the moment, we taxpayers seem to have a lot of the risk and none of the profit.

Hutton on the Button

Not Lord Hutton of course, nor the Business Secretary. But Will Hutton, writing in the Observer, challenges some of the received wisdom. The "why aren't the Tories doing better?" question is a bit tricky these days, but Hutton points out that Shadow Chancellor George Osborne is failing to make the most of a "heaven-sent opportunity for effective opposition" in the form of the credit crunch:

Osborne goes through the motions, but what stymies him is that he is a believer in the very policies and attitudes that have delivered the crisis. It seems a matter of personal incredulity that free markets, in which he has invested so much political capital, deliver irrational credit booms and busts. In his mind, regulation is always the problem not the solution. Public intervention and ownership are always wrong. Thus he consistently opposed the only viable future for Northern Rock (temporary public ownership), and now helps make the mortgage crisis worse by insisting that Britain's fifth largest lender should pull out of the market because it is publicly owned. Mad.

Hutton concludes that people still believe in the values that Labour - and Gordon Brown - represent:

These are Labour, not Tory, times. The next election remains his to lose.

Privately religious

Apparently Eamonn Butler is the author of some book about how to love the free market, which is about to be published. You might think it would be a problem for him that the privately owned banks have made such a hash of things that they have to be bailed out by the state. Well it is, but he turns it into an opportunity by arguing in the Times that it's all the fault of governments.

As an exercise in blind faith, it's quite impressive. It follows the usual theological path of making up more and more preposterous arguments to explain why the world is after all flat, why the sun goes round the earth etc. Apparently, it is too much regulation that has caused the banks to devise increasingly dodgy financial products that are now considered toxic. Please...

The private sector rules

Daniel Hannan, blogging on the Telegraph site has a bit of a rant about Black Wednesday and people who supported UK entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism:

If these people had been employed as the forecasters in the private sector, they would be out of a job.

As Northern Rock, a former building society turned bank, goes belly up.