The Nationalisation of Northern Rock exposes the façade of the free market banking system, reveals that capitalists always look after ‘number one' and is an insult to all those in manufacturing and related industries who have previously lost their livelihoods having been lectured on the value of free market economics.
Internationally renowned free market economists writing for the pink press have criticised the Chancellor Alistair Darling (indirectly Gordon Brown) not for Nationalising Northern Rock but for not doing it soon enough. Nationalisation is the antithesis of laissez-faire economics as it contradicts one of its fundamental tenants - that of government non-intervention. Indeed the way in which hundreds of billions of dollars of public funds have been pumped into the financial markets exposes the reality that capitalist governments in fact underwrite the whole banking system. Thus, it is sham to say the banking system is a competitive market where risk and return is priced accordingly.
The blank cheque of tax payers money offered to rich banks by western governments is also a huge insult to the hundreds of thousands of blue collar workers that have lost jobs in manufacturing; car making; coal and steel industries. Lowly paid workers lost jobs and resorted to begging on the streets having had to accept the harsh reality of the free market capitalist economics in contrast to a few thousand white collar banking executives, many on huge bonuses, whose jobs have been safeguarded.
Thus, clearly there is one rule for the less skilled, working class and another rule for the rich. This inherent bias in the capitalist system favours the founders and leading drivers of capitalism - the Bankers. Family names like Barclays, Baring and Rothschild were as prominent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as they are today. Banks have a government licence to in effect print money - in good times, they make hundreds of billions in profits exacerbating the income and wealth inequality in society, yet in bad times, their over-exuberance and greed is not punished as the saga on Northern Rock clearly shows.
These examples uncover the unjust and the patchwork solutions offered by capitalism - a system not fit for purpose.
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