Government leaves customers out in the cold

So the government acted slowly and the treasury foolishly with its bungled nationalisation of Northern Wreck. You’ll forgive me if I refrain from gasping and holding my cheeks in disbelief.

It has been always painfully obvious that this is the case – and it is becoming more painful with every passing day, particularly for those poor mortgage holders who were enticed by the supposed competitiveness and security of a state run institution.

That a government run bank was still offering 125 per cent mortgages as recently as last Spring is awful, but hardly surprising. We know that at the time Brown was imploring banks to “return to 2007 levels of lending”. Chief exec Gordon clearly still believes that in order for people to keep afloat, they need to be in debt.

Even as the housing bubble was popping, the government instantly – and knowingly - put thousands of households in negative equity.  

Why? Conservative MP Edward Leigh yesterday asked a similar question:

Why didn’t the Treasury demand an immediate stop to the reckless lending that got the bank into trouble in the first place?

Gordon Brown and his treasury cronies might be accurate when they bang on about savers not losing a penny of the money in their accounts, as they successfully averted a full-scale banking collapse.

But what of those people who have lost their homes, on the government’s watch? What of pension losers? (There are many.)

The government has essentially lent to families before turfing them out of their home. All we can do in response is to turf Gordon Brown out of his.