Anthony Hilton in the 'Standard'

If the question is whether the government should allow a bank or two to break pour encourager les autres, I think the answer is yes. Anthony Hilton has this tonight in the 'Standard':

Reliance on financial services has at times made the UK economy look like a giant hedge fund and made us - both citizens and government - predisposed to spend the money without thinking too hard about where it came from or how it was being earned. Had we looked more inquisitively we would have seen that the financial sector has grown bigger than the world economy needed it to be, and as a result was filling its days inventing ever more exotic products that it claimed made markets more efficient and added to economic growth but in fact contributed little to either.

Finance had become a machine to slice up and repackage old wealth for the fees it could earn, rather than a service to help others create new wealth. The consequences of that have now become apparent. When finance slows there is not enough to fall back on. Economics has run ahead of politics across the world. Finance and markets and business have become global and respond to global pressures. Politics is still nation-based, local and unable properly to respond to the demands of the new world order. This is bad news because the actions of politicians - and it must be said the wishes of voters they represent - threaten to prolong the crisis.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the seemingly endless succession of bank bailouts and rescues. The financial sector needs to go back to basics, renounce its addiction to gambling and rediscover its purpose as a facilitator of economic growth in others. But that means it will have to be smaller and less well paid. Getting back on that even keel means letting some of those banks go bust - but the politicians are too scared to do it. It will happen in the end, though, because ultimately there is no alternative. The economy will slow further as banks withdraw finance from other productive parts of the economy, commercial property companies go bust, speculative office blocks stand empty, shopping malls get boarded up and individuals struggle to save more to relieve their debt burdens.

Fair dos. Let's get the pain over with, then. Let a bank or two break, let the others pick up the pieces. I knew Brown should never have bailed Northern Crock out. So no more tax bail-outs from the UK - let them go begging to the US if they want to.