Billions for banks - dole for workers

Chancellor Alistair Darling announced that an astonishing £33.5bn in cash and debt guarantees will be given to the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) - on top of the £20 billion the taxpayer has already handed over - to make the RBS bailout the costliest bank rescue in history.

The government has also found another £5.7bn which will be presented to directors at Lloyds to add to their earlier £17bn state handout, with the only concession being that bonuses for executive directors due this year will be deferred until 2012.

Together, the value of yesterday's bailouts to just two banks amount to the total cost of building more than 1,500 schools or 70 hospitals.

But the colossal injection of public cash, which takes the government's ownership of RBS to 84 per cent and of Lloyds to 43 per cent, comes at a deadly price to the jobs of the public sector's newest workers.

Insisting that "the government does not want to be in the business of running banks," Mr Darling demanded that RBS sell off 318 high street branches and that Lloyds hive off another 600 local banks to private buyers in order to comply with a ruling by the European Commission.

Finance workers' union leaders reacted with disbelief at the government offering bailouts to wealthy executives while risking the jobs of "thousands of loyal workers in bank branches throughout Britain."

Unite national officer Rob MacGregor pointed out that RBS bosses had already announced huge cuts to front-line bank staff which will mean 3,700 people losing their jobs.

"The employers and the government have a duty to these long-suffering staff to ensure that opportunistic buyers of local high street branches are not permitted to asset-strip these institutions, leaving thousands of staff facing a bleak future," he insisted.

"While the government is saving the banks, it should also save the workers."

Left Economics Advisory Panel co-ordinator Andrew Fisher accused the government of "yet another business-as-usual bailout.

"The government is rescuing the banks and protecting profits and bonuses, but it is providing no guarantees for the workforce or mortgage holders struggling to make repayments," he stressed.

"This is not nationalisation, but simply welfare for the corporate sector, which will be paid for by cutting welfare and public services for the majority."

Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray urged the Edinburgh-based RBS to work with the finance workers' unions to try to avoid the job cuts, insisting that, "if there are any job losses that are not voluntary, RBS must fully justify them."