Society

Virgin Money made a bid for Northern Rock in 2008, and in 2011 it got the go-ahead from the British government to buy the defunct bank.

Tamara and I were in London on the day that Northern Rock’s demise was being debated in the House Of Commons. Tamara had been invited to tea at the the House of Lords earlier that day, and I went to collect her.

We decided to walk down the corridor and watch the proceedings in the House of Commons. We stood in line and went through endless corridors to eventually find ourselves in the Visitors’ Gallery looking down on the Speaker and the assembled MPs.

It couldn’t have been better timing because, the House was at that very time debating the proposed takeover of Northern Rock.

The chamber was packed and the two sides of the House were arguing bitterly over whose fault it was that the bank had collapsed. Was it due to easy credit, poor regulation, bad tax incentives, sky-high commissions?

We watched the debate for a long while, looking through the new plexiglass screens along all sides of the chamber that separated the visitors from the MPs below.

Northern Rock’s Background

Northern Rock was a bank. It started out life as a Building Society, and its lending policy was governed by the Building Societies Acts, which meant it could only lend money against mortgages on property and that it had to follow the strict rules applicable to building societies.

Changes In Legislation: From A Building Society To A Bank

Northern Rock became a bank in the 1990s when, owing to changes in legislation, many other building societies were taking the opportunity to do the same. The advantages were that as a bank it could invest and also borrow more widely.

Unfortunately, the new latitude led to its becoming the first bank in 150 years of British banking to suffer a run on its assets. Trading between banks, is conducted on a short cycle. The borrower borrows for six months and must then repay unless a new borrowing cycle is agreed. Bigger banks decided they didn’t want to lend on Northern Rock’s lending portfolio and the Bank of England having to step in.

Northern Rock had of course bet on an international portfolio that was caught in the 2008 financial crash. It had gone out to play with the big boys and it had been caught short.

For the UK, the run on Northern Rock’s assets carried the risk of a total default, so the British government bought the bank.

Northern Rock wasn’t the only bank to fail. For whatever reason, the Government bailed out the Royal Bank of Scotland and LloydsTSB Bank, but it let Northern Rock go to the wall. Perhaps it wasn’t too big to fail, to quote the US authorities who rescued the biggest US banks.

Crown Copyright

As Tamara and I lined up to go into the visitors’ gallery of the House of Commons we were each handed a thin A4-size booklet that contained a copy of the day’s proceedings.

I would show you a photograph of the booklet, but it is Crown copyright. What that means is that I would need a licence to copy it.

Growing up in England, I was aware that Crown copyright protected all kinds of things from being copied to the detriment of the publishers – namely the Crown, the courts, Parliament, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, and other similar institutions.

An American Perspective On Government Copyright

At least that was how I looked at it until I read Heather Brooke’s book The Revolution Will Be Digitised: Dispatches From The Information War.

Heather Brooke is an American who at the time was living in Britain. It was she who blew open the MPs’ expenses scandal.

In the book, which is mostly about Wikileaks and whistleblowers, she explains what Crown copyright is from her perspective, contrasting copyright in the United States and in Britain.

Originating with a principle laid down by Thomas Jefferson, all documents originating with the American government belong to the people.

That is why all Americans are free to copy, for example, Dorothea Lange’s world-famous photographs of poverty during the Great Depression.

In Britain the situation is different. And as Heather Brooke puts it, Crown copyright means that citizens have to ask their government for permission to use public data.

She found this out first hand when she made repeated requests for information about MPs’ expenses under the new Freedom Of Information Act and found that public bodies placed copyright notices on their responses.

Her view is that copyrighting of public information in Britain is specifically used as a means of restricting the flow of public information.

They Try To Work For You

As an example of what that means, in 2004 Parliament demanded that the They Work For You website shut down because it published details of how MPs had voted on matters in the House of Commons.

The information is published in the official records of Parliament known as Hansard, and Hansard is owned by Parliament and not by the people. So copying information from it is protected by Crown copyright.

In the end, Parliament was itself backed into a corner and was forced to grant a licence to They Work For You because the idea of suing a website for making such information available to the public was embarrassing to it.

One could say that democracy prevailed, but the reality is that TheyWorkForYou survived because it accepted that it needed a licence, and the Crown Copyright system sails on into the future.

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Originally published November 17th, 2011

The following is an extract from a contemporary record of events leading to the Peasants’ Revolt, as described in The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 edited by RB (Barrie) Dobson.

Then the bishop of Lincoln sent notice throughout his whole diocese giving general power to all priests, both regulars and seculars, to hear confessions and give absolution with full episcopal authority to all persons, except only in case of debt.

In such a case, the debtor was to pay the debt, if he were able, while he lived, or others were to be appointed to do so from his goods after his death.

In the same way the Pope gave plenary remission of all sins (once only) to all receiving absolution at the point of death, and granted that this power should last until Easter next following, and that every one might choose his own confessor at will. 

In the following autumn a reaper was not to be had for less than 8d, with his food, a mower for less than 12d, with food.

Therefore many crops rotted in the fields for lack of men to gather them. But in the year of the pestilence, as has been said above of other things, there was so great an abundance of all kinds of corn that virtually no one cared for it. 

My Thoughts On Reading The Above

What gets me is the reference to “give absolution with full episcopal authority to all persons, except only in case of debt”. What singles out debt that it cannot be absolved? And why the sticking point at the giving of absolution but “once only”. What is sacred about receiving one absolution only?

Oh pity the reluctant gunslinger, for he must fight another fight.

I call it gunslinger syndrome, the man who was a gunslinger and then saw the light and gave it up. Now he just wants to live like a normal person. But he is not a normal person; he is fast on the draw. So when the citizens need help, he is forced against his will to return to the thing he does best, and shoot down the oppressor for the sake of the citizens.

And we the audience, we want to see the fight. If there is no fight, we will feel robbed of our spectacle. There can be many other resolutions, but we want ‘our’ resolution. We want to see our man do his thing. We are the spectators and the gunfight is the Roman arena.

Our appetite for that finale is so strong that we want to see it again and again. Screenwriters have to invent whole scenarios that will make it credible and needed for that final gunfight to happen.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be guns. Japanese sword fights, boxing, martial arts, they can all work. But for a crescendo, a gunfight is hard to beat. There is space around the protagonists so that we can see the denouement and the reluctant gunslinger with perfect clarity.

James Coburn in Waterhole No. 3 violated the rule of the gunfight. Early on in the film he is called out to fight some nameless gunslinger. Coburn goes out to face the man standing way down Main Street. He is required by the law of gunfights to walk down the street to within revolver distance, and face off against his opponent.

Instead, he walks around behind his horse; pulls his rifle out of its scabbard, and uses the horse’s back as a support to shoot the other man down. What a dastardly deed! I forget what exact comment Coburn made, but it was to the effect that only a fool would stand within a few yards of another in the hope of being first on the draw.

The film Shane is the paradigm of the tale of the retired gunslinger blighted by his past. The rancher’s young son wants to be him; the rancher looks at his own life and wants the magic of being the gunslinger; and the rancher’s wife looks at Shane and wants him.

The gunslinger that Shane must face is dressed in black. He is needlessly cruel, and he is complacent in his triumph. How happy we will be when he is gunned down. How unhappy we would be if the gunfight were never to take place.

The book, Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd, is full of first-hand accounts by way of diary notes, reports, articles, and reported conversations of ordinary travellers in Germany in the 1930s.

The author describes how the NSDAP used every trick on the propaganda book to blind foreign visitors to what was going on and to get the populace on board. The Party used torchlight processions, mass parades, control of the media, etc. backed up by the essential fascist tool of violence as a first resort.

Violence and antisemitism were hidden from visitors and thrust in the face of the populace. As an example, during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, antisemitic posters and signs were taken down, and then put up again after the games had finished.

Yet looking back, I cannot help but think that many people look for any excuse to behave badly. Just give them a justification. Just give them an idea onto which they can latch. Give them reason why an idea is more important than a life.

That was then. What I see now is that people are being whipped up with new tools in the propaganda armoury.

Observers say that the danger of social media and online news commenting is that the commenters can be annonymous.

That is not the danger of social media; it is the beauty of it.

People’s anger is being whipped up. They are being taught, trained, to see things as though the differences between them and those who think otherwise are separated by an unbridgeable divide.

They are being taught, trained, that there is no space in between for compromise, for unity, for community, for talking, for getting together.

The reason they are being trained is so that they become trainable.

So I was reading the book this morning, and then I read the news. I read that last night, Mark Field MP, Minister of State for Asia and the Pacific, MP for Cities of London & Westminster, attacked a climate protester who gatecrashed a dinner where the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, was speaking.

The BBC have a nice video of what happened, so there is no saying it was anything other than what it was. The MP attacked the protester, and it is clear that he did so because he thought it was OK to do so.

The protester was a woman, so he didn’t have to worry that a burly protester would floor him.

Field later apologised for ‘grabbing’ her (he didn’t grab her; he attacked her), and then made his situation worse by his patently untrue claim that he was worried the protester may have been armed.

What made his ‘instinctive grab’, his attack, on the woman seem to him to be OK and the thing to do?

I think one can make a good case for saying that thirty years ago, a little voice in his head would have restrained him. Not today. No one is immune from being trained, much less the people in the thick of it.