- Kitchen boss Vance Miller 'duped customers', MenMedia.co.uk, September 29, 2009.
2. What's a few billion pounds between friends?
Yes, we may have broken one of our most highly-prized borrowing rules. Yes, the size of the national debt - the most talismanic measure of the state of the public finances - may have been dramatically inflated because of the Northern Rock fiasco. But take a chill pill, we are “relaxed” about this.
The Treasury’s complacent reaction to the news that Northern Rock’s £100 billion debt is to be poured into the national debt was staggering. Here is clear evidence that the taxpayer is now having to bear the entire risk surrounding the stricken mortgage lender - and yet the Government insisted that the news was small beer.
In all but name, Northern Rock is now nationalised. The Office for National Statistics has pored through the hundreds of pages of legal contracts surrounding the bank and its emergency loan from the Bank of England and has concluded that the public sector is decisively in control of it.
The only fig leaf preventing it from being fully classified as nationalised is the fact that the company is still, technically, owned by the shareholders.
That the Treasury of one of the world’s supposedly most free-market globalised economies could describe itself as “relaxed” about such a prospect is among the scariest things yet heard in this saga.
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