Good old Iceland

On the whole I think it's a good idea that Northern Rock has been nationalised. Firstly because there obviously wasn't a private buyer who wouldn't have demanded so much unchallengeable money up front as to make the whole thing unmanageable. Secondly because something needs to happen to break the taboo about nationalisation - which was the main reason the establishment, including (or especially) NuLab, was so much against it. Sorry, chaps, the idea may be here to stay now.

Thirdly, because we might be needing a nationalised bank. The existing cartel of cut-throats are currently saying that they must be allowed to charge people what they like for the occasional overdraft (illegal though the current charges are), otherwise they may have to charge everybody for having an account at all. Now this isn't on. We don't "choose" to have a bank account, we effing well have to, because employers won't pay our wages in any other way. A few years ago, when working in the public service, I enquired, not entirely seriously, whether I could have my monthly salary in cash in a brown envelope. Not that I was really on for paying my leccy and phone bills personally in cash, but still. If the bastard banks are going to charge us by the month for running our accounts, there needs to be a simple alternative, no doubt with a limited service and possibly without overdrafts, which will do what 90% of us want for free. Why can't Northern Rock be that?

George Trefgarne, writing in this week's Spectator, disagrees with me. The government bail-out of Northern Rock, he says, has created "moral hazard", which means encouraging other banks to behave just as irresponsibly in the knowledge that the government can't really let them swing in the wind. "The bosses of every high-street bank comparable to Northern Rock now know that however bad their decisions, however risky their speculations, they will be bailed out by the government. If things go wrong they can simply resign, having amassed millions in bonuses and share options over the years, as Adam Applegarth, the ex-Northern Rock chief executive, did before Christmas."

Trefgarne, though a Tory, is dead right. The cunt's got clean away with it. And we all know that the main reason for the run on the bank was that everyone assumed, no doubt rightly, that if things went tits up then Applegarth and his cronies would have grabbed all the remaining money and told the depositors "sorry, nothing left for you!"

It is here that my thoughts drift off to the ancient Icelandic legal system, whereby people who behaved like that were sentenced by a popular assembly to outlawry, i.e. anybody who had suffered at their hands could go and knock them off without legal penalty.

In the same cultural context, I am reminded of an episode in the Icelandic saga of Njàl, where the house of Njàl and his delinquent sons is surrounded by hundreds of enemies and burnt down over their heads. I think that there is a connection here to Adam Applegarth. I hope I find out his address one day.