Brown's badly bungled big banks bailout [my old English teacher would have beamed happily at the alliteration] was ill-conceived but many have argued that he had no alternative. But is this really so? - Certainly something had to be done to protect investors, unless that is, you want endless rioting on the streets as the greedy take down 'the little man' with them as they plummet towards oblivion.But did it have to all be done in such a way that the engineers of the downfall remained 'in post' with their bonuses virtually unscathed? - The answer is no.
They should have been allowed to go bust and then the government should have moved in to buy them up and act as guarantor to the investors.
It would have been significantly cheaper and would have made all workers effectively redundant. You could then have renotiated realistic deals with all staff from top to bottom.
It would have meant pay cuts well down the pyramid, of course - but which other job guarantees continued employment at the same level as before when the business you are working for goes bust? Is it only right to see workers in the industrial sector thrown onto the scrapheap? If somebody has a white collar job, does this make them socially a 'special case' or a 'protected species'?
I spoke to a friend last night who tells me that a 100 redundancies were announced at his industrial firm in the last week. Oh - well, never mind!
So not only is the Brown solution a poor one but staff jobs are being shed as if there is no tomorrow, in any case.
