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A Rock and a Hard Place

THE Northern Rock fiasco is fast becoming Labour's "Black Wednesday." I The differenee is that the 1992 devaluation crisis freed Britain from the euro and p«vcd the way for a record 15 years of growth.

The £3.3bn price tag then was peanuts compared with the tens of billions taxpayers stand to tosc today — with nothing in return.

So far it’s £24bn — £900 for every single taxpayer.

But it could cnd up twice as high.

That's a heli of a lot of nioney - enough to pay eveiyone’s council tax for a year.

Hapless Chanccllor Alistair Darling refused yesterday to guarantee taxpayęrs will ever see their nioney again.

He promised to proteet their interests when the truth is, he can’t.

But iliis is not just Mr Darling’s disaster. Gordon Brown must shoulder at least some of the blame.

It was the PM’s first act as Chancellor to relieve the Bank of England of its stcwardship over the City’s financiai markcts.

He split that responsibility between the Bank, theTreasury and the Financial Services Authority — but with nobody in overall command.

As Bank governor Mervyn King tricd to warn earlier this year, it left the way open for this sort of crisis to dcvelop — badly damaging Bi ilain’s global reputation for financiai integrity.

Now Mr Brown must dccide whether to throw morę good taxpayers’ money after bad.

And whichever way he leans, the losers are taxpayers, the world’s grcatest money market, and the government itself.