Tuesday Feb 19th 2008
Chewing on the Rock
So Darling, you have nationalised Northern Rock. Well done, it is quite an achievement after a gap of 37 years since the last state takeover. To put 37 years into some sort of perspective it is practically as long as the gap between the premierships of Neville Chamberlain and Margaret Thatcher.
So what did the media make of this major event on the Monday morning after? Behind some bold headlines there was a curious reticence. The Daily Telegraph comment pages, where a chance to re-fight the battles of the 1970s is rarely foregone, provided no opinion on the topic and instead provided analysis of the merits of Bertie Wooster and Billie Bunter. Perhaps we really are going back in time, and for once the DT is ahead of the rest of the country.
At the Guardian this was certainly a major event. Indeed, according to Martin Jacques it marked “the dawn of the biggest geopolitical shift since the dawn of the industrial era.” He went on to blow all hyperbole not so much out of the water as across the Atlantic – the nationalisation of the Gosforth-based company is the result (or was that the cause, I forget) of the “economic decline of the US” and its dependence on East Asian capital. In case this is still not big enough news the nationalisation also heralds the end of the “triumph of neoliberalism” that began in the 1970s. Mr Jacques neglects to inform us that during this period of “triumph” the state actually grew from 40 to 42% of the UK economy.
Over at the Financial Times the event seemed to provoke utter schizophrenia. The headline reported “fury” and it was declared that Brown had “a lot of explaining to do” for what was nevertheless described as “the only solution” that was likely to leave taxpayers “close to quits.” The paper’s editorial declared that the Rock can now look to the future – opposite opinion pages bemoaning Germany’s public sector banks and calling for the privatisation of Radios 1 and 2, followed by complaints in the Lex column about government hand-outs to Japanese banks. FT readers who probed other stories might have been further confused about the future of banking: financial services are recruiting fewer graduates but now is apparently a great time to start an MBA as part of a move into banking.
The Independent must be awarded points for financial illiteracy, with headlines proclaiming that the Rock is now owned by ‘UK Ltd.’ In case any Indie sub-editors are reading this, “ltd” stands for limited; basically meaning that the level of debt the corporation can accrue is limited. This is not the case for governments or societies. Inside were further pearls of wisdom: the columnist Steve Richards assured us that it is “not the Chancellor but the Tories who are isolated.” He seemed to have no comment the next day in response assorted media headlines entitled fury, backlash and under fire.
And away from the passé world of newspapers? What was happening in the hip, viral, now world of the interweb? The “Nationalize Northern Rock”(sic) Facebook group lost four members overnight, and seemed to have no comment in what was surely its hour of glory.
Edmund Burke | 5:24pm |
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