Letters From A Tory

Dear Simon Heffer,

Well done on a superb summary of the Northern Rock crisis in today’s Telegraph.  You have succinctly captured the idiocy of the entire situation from the government’s perspective and made it very clear how incredibly dangerous the don’t-worry-Gordon-will-bail-you-out precedent is.

For all this panic and fear spread around by the media, you quite rightly pointed out that nothing particularly serious was ever likely to happen.  If Northern Rock’s share price kept falling as people kept withdrawing their money, so what?  Their share price would have got so low that they would have been a perfect buy-out opportunity for another bank who could have taken over all their assets for a fraction of their market value, and made a huge profit in the long run.  Gordon Brown and his “pupper Chancellor” have written a frighteningly large blank cheque to Northern Rock and as you said, this equates to telling every bank operating in the UK that you can screw up and take the most ridiculous risks and the taxpayer will still bail you out.

Northern Rock was never a crisis - it was capitalism in action.  Sometimes businesses take risks which don’t work out.  Northern Rock’s financial basis was whipped away from under their feet and they suffered accordingly, but that was a risk they were willing to take.  Who cares if the shareholders lost money?  Who cares if the customers stood to lose money?  Every year businesses die all around the country because they made a bad call - it’s called capitalism!  Gordon Brown is still a socialist at heart and can’t bear to see his potential voters getting stressed over their savings, so when the poll ratings are a little bit shaky, up steps the puppet Chancellor on his behalf to save the day.

It makes me physically sick, it really does.  The fact that the Conservatives agree with the puppet Chancellor’s intervention and are going to jump on Gordon Brown’s spending bandwagon just makes the whole thing that little bit worse.

Yours in admiration (for Simon Heffer, not Gordon Brown…)

A.Tory