Swearing in church

Mr Sandler's disgraced predecessor Adam Applegarth, who rode the financial tiger of interest rate gambling that put the existence of the bank in doubt, has no such worries. He was able to walk away from the corporate car crash that his profits-intoxicated driving had caused with his financial future secure.

A pension pot of £2.2 million, £63,333 a month for a year, a £5,000 donation to his legal fees and £75,000 of his mortgage at the concessionary staff interest rate until November are his rewards for a record of adventurism and irresponsibility.

Northern Rock workers, on the other hand, behaved professionally and conscientiously and, in return, 2,000 of their jobs will be axed by 2011.

Unlike Mr Applegarth, they did not decide, with great prescience, to sell £2 million worth of shares shortly before the run on the bank, at a time when the management was still encouraging staff to buy shares in it.

They are not to blame for the destruction of a major financial institution with significant regional importance in north-east England and Mr Sandler should listen to what Unite deputy general secretary Graham Goddard and his colleagues say on the question of no compulsory redundancies.

Above all, the government, which has nationalised Northern Rock with £25 billion of our money, must press Mr Sandler to do so.

Neither the government nor Mr Sandler has a mandate to offload staff, slash outgoings, downsize the bank and hand over a new slimline business at a knockdown price to City sharks.

It is clear that giving the City a free hand to play fast and loose with investments, mortgages and pensions is at the heart of the predicament for Northern Rock and for the rest of the finance sector, which is beset with growing problems.

Such problems do not arise simply because people like Adam Applegarth are self-centred, rash, greedy bastards, even though they are.

Financial crises are built into the free-market system. They are integral to its operation because of the drive to maximise profit.

And, instead of exposing this reality and proposing an alternative socialist approach, our Labour government lauds the City buccaneers and feeds their avarice by handing over public finance daily via privatisation deals, private penetration of health, education, housing and social service provision.

Favouring the rich over the poor has a dispiriting effect on working people who have traditionally looked to Labour to at least mitigate the worst effects of capitalism.

As Civil Service union PCS president Janice Godrich told Thursday's London May Day rally, today's generation of working-class parents is the first for two centuries to expect their children to be worse off than them.

Six weeks ago, Unite joint general secretary Derek Simpson did the equivalent of swearing in the new Labour church by stating that the private market system is a lame duck.

That understanding has to become generalised in the labour movement and, more crucially, extended into political organisation to end the tyranny of finance capital.