Vindication for those of us who called for nationalisation and taxpayer-representation on bank Boards -- at last, the Government follows our lead

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/3184842/Bank-nationalisation-How-a-bail-out-became-a-buy-out.html

Check out the sub-head to this piece: "October 13, 2008 will go down in history as the day the capitalist system in the UK finally admitted defeat." These are extraordinary days (in fact, the crisis is so fast-moving now, that it would be more accurate to say: 'These are extraordinary hours'...): this blogger's call and then the Green Party's call for the banks to be nationalised -- for no taxation without representation -- have been dramatically vindicated. At last, we the taxpayers are going to get seats on the Boards of banks. At last, banks will be forced to lend to each other, and to their customers, especially small businesses, who are at the moment being either gouged or stonewalled by commercial banks. At last, the obscene profiteering of the banks will be reined in, including dividends and executive bonuses.

I would have preferred a bigger, fuller, more pro-active, earlier nationalisation. As detailed here http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/at-dawn-the-banks-were-back-from-the-brink-958346.html, the 'preference shares' move last week was totally inadequate. If we are to put our money into banks, then we need to be able to exert real control over banks. That is the path that the Government, albeit too tentatively, too piecemeal, and much later than they should have done, has at last embarked upon. I hope that the Government (i.e. us taxpayers) are not over-paying even now for the shares of HBoS and RBS; we may yet rue that a more dramatic total nationalisation has not yet been countenanced.

But what is clear today is: The Thatcherite experiment of finance deregulation has utterly failed. When the _Daily Telegraph_ says, as above, that it is the dawn of a new era of state regulation and control, then you know that something profound has changed in our world...