Banking (Special Provisions) Bill

That may be the case. It brings to mind the time of the Oxford martyrs, when Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley were facing the Catholic experts. It was said at the time that in the arguments, Master Cranmer leant on Master Latimer, who leant on Master Ridley; Master Ridley leant on the singularity of his own wit. It is a pity that the Oxford fire snuffed out the wit in the Ridley family. We need to come to the wider question of why the other banks turned down the request for help. The answer is that irresponsible banks in the United States, Britain, Switzerland, France and Germany had all lost fortunes on what they call ““sub-prime mortgages”” in the United States. Other people call that lending money to people who could not pay it back. It was not just that the banks gambled and lost billions of dollars. None of them could trust what any other bank said about its potential losses. Some were making false statements and others refused to reveal what their losses were, so the banks cut down on their lending to each other, and none were in a position to bail out Northern Rock. The situation was not just the result of a failure of a single bank—it was due to the failure of the whole market. Those losses and that distrust have also stymied the Government's efforts in the past five months to get a private sector solution to the Northern Rock crisis. If the sub-prime mortgages crisis had not occurred, the chances are that there would have been a private sector solution to the problem, and everybody would have welcomed that. On top of all that, the Tories and their friends in the news media go on and on about how nationalisation has damaged Britain's financial reputation in the eyes of the world. However, it cannot do such damage in a substantial part of western Europe, where there are publicly owned commercial banks. In whose eyes do the Tories and their friends believe that Britain's reputation has been damaged? Is it in the eyes of Citigroup in the United States? It lost $24 billion in the sub-prime crisis. Merrill Lynch lost $22 billion, the Bank of America lost $5 billion and JPMorgan lost $3 billion. Has our reputation been damaged in the eyes of France, where Crédit Agricole lost $5 billion, Société Générale lost $3 billion and BNP Paribas lost $1 billion? Has it been damaged in the eyes of Germany, where Bayern LB lost $3 billion, Commerzbank lost $1 billion and Deutsche Bank lost $3 billion? Perhaps the Tories and their friends think that Britain's reputation has been damaged in the eyes of the Swiss, but UBS lost $18 billion, Swiss Re lost $1 billion and it has been revealed today that Crédit Suisse lost $3 billion.