The government has now pumped about £60 billion of our money into Northern Rock. That’s a lot of money – it’s more than half what the health service costs. Now the NHS is looking after millions of people at any one time and hospital services are available round the clock for you in case anything goes wrong. It employs over a million people and its benefits are there for all to see.

What benefit are we getting from the money used to prop up Northern Rock? Why does a failed bank deserve to have all this money thrown at it? To New Labour’s shame it is LibDem Vince Cable who points out, “This is a very small tail wagging a very large dog.”

As we explained in the last issue, the vultures are hovering round Northern Rock. There are the shareholders on the one hand, people who think the rest of us owe them a living and, if they bet on a horse that loses, then we should just give them their money back. The existing management are still hanging on, selling off the bank’s assets as fast as they can. Then there are the profiteers like Richard Branson, always on hand when the government is handing out free money.

New Labour fears that if Northern Rock goes down the tubes large chunks of the financial system could follow. And that would reverberate throughout the economy. Recession is on its way. A financial collapse could be the trigger. The right thing to do is staring Brown and Darling in the face. They should take over Northern Rock. That would not be a socialist policy. Thatcher took over the Johnson Matthey Bank for £1 after a similar collapse twenty years ago. She was a consummate representative of the capitalist system.

The government has not nationalised the Rock so far because of what Vince Cable calls their “ideological preoccupations against public ownership.” They want to be seen as bigger Tories than Thatcher! They have been pathetically hoping against hope for a white knight to gallop along and solve all their problems. By dithering, they have of course made the financial crisis worse. Unite is also encouraging its members at Northern Rock to live in fantasy-land by opposing nationalisation. It’s time they snapped out of it.

Why are banks so special for capitalism? Why do they have to be bailed out when they fail? As Trotsky argues (Transitional Programme), “The banks concentrate in their hands the actual command over the economy.” So when they have a crisis, we’re all in the firing line. As Trotsky goes on, “They combine tendencies of monopoly with tendencies of anarchy...they organise high prices, crises and unemployment.”

That is why, while other firms have had crises in their profits, the sums made by the financial institutions, and their share of the surplus value extracted by the working class, just goes up and up? Actually they’re holding us all to ransom. And it’s time it stopped.

Banks are not popular. At the time of writing I fought the Lloyds is in the charts. Even bank adverts emphasise the arrogance and poor service of ‘other’ banks. The Consumers’ Association are taking the banks to court. They’re sick of the arbitrary charges the banks put on people’s accounts. Not only do the banks charge us for the privilege of borrowing our money. They don’t even do us the decency of telling us how much the charges are – like selling goods with no price tag. Who will win the case? The banks will win. If the Consumers’ Association gets free banking, the banks will just introduce a new structure of arbitrary charges so as to make sure their safe steady profits stay sky high.

The government will probably end up nationalising Northern Rock, after they’ve wasted so much of our money. It’s time to take over all the banks! They are a conduit through which everyone’s money is channelled. If we want to plan the economy we have to own the banks and control where the money goes.

A socialist Labour government would take over the banks. We can guarantee the value of your bank account, unlike Northern Rock. We will compensate small shareholders, but generally the banks have had their hands in our pockets for long enough. No compensation to the fat cats who’ve fed off us for generations! Under capitalism the banks can never lose. And we can never win. Let’s take them all over, eliminate their power over us and use the resources they control for the good of working people.