Given the large sums of money at stake and the important matters of principle raised current mortgage rates, it is hardly surprising that the shareholders decided to seek judicial review of the government’s actions. The most important legislation to help them in their claim was the 1998 Human Rights Act, which included a right to private property. According to Lord Woolf, Lord Chief Justice from 2000 to 2005, in his collection of papers on The Pursuit of Justice, the passage of the Human Rights Act ‘incorporated the European Convention [on Human Rights] into our domestic law’. In his view this ‘had proved a catalyst, transforming the availability of protection for breaches of human rights’ in the UK. Again mortgage loan, in his words, before the Human Rights Act became effective in 2000, ‘All too often our citizens would have to appeal to the Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg for remedies they could not obtain from their own English courts’.

Thirdly, in early June the European Commission wrote to the Treasury expressing concern that – despite the steps already taken by the British government – some elements of the Northern Rock package remained illegal under state aid rules. Despite the 2,000 redundancies, the EU’s officials felt that more needed to be done. As explained below, the economic basis of the Commission’s attitude, that Northern Rock was in receipt of state aid, was almost certainly wrong. Nevertheless, it demanded more job losses in a part of England already suffering from high unemployment, purely in order to comply with the rules.

Most British people continue to believe that they live in an independent nation. A British army, a Royal Navy and a Royal Air Force are still in being, a British team appears in the Olympics, a British entry is made for the Eurovision song contest bad credit loan, every year the Queen makes a speech about the government of her realm at the state opening of Parliament, thousands of young people sing ‘Rule Britannia’ with gusto at the Last Night of the Proms, and so on. The account of the Northern Rock affair in this paper has shown that in reality key institutions of the British state now take their orders, to a large extent, from the European Commission or other EU agencies.

Most conspicuously, the Treasury may purport to be the premier department in the British state, but on important matters it regards itself as subordinate to the European Commission. That is the only interpretation allowed by its determination to seek out the Commission’s opinion of the applicability of the EU’s state aid rules to the Northern Rock package. Moreover, Treasury ministers took decisions with the deliberate and explicit purpose of complying with these rules. Britain’s own national interest appeared not to figure in their thinking. Again, after its nationalisation Northern Rock’s new management acknowledged that it had to respect a mass of rules for state-owned banks formulated in Brussels, not in London. Even worse, within a few weeks of the nationalisation announcement the management had to sack almost a third of the staff for no reason other than that the European Commission demanded that they be sacked debt management.