Isn’t it funny how Government and local authorities always seem to be skint when it comes to paying for things we really want like more hospitals, more and better maintained schools, weekly rubbish collections, vital cancer medication, better pensions etc but suddenly the government have accessed £500 billion to help the banks and it is revealed that dozens of councils have millions of spare cash invested in Icelandic banks!

All right, I know, I don’t understand much about the finance and business world and this blog might seem a bit ignorant to those in the know, but to ordinary folk this just seems unbelievable, where has the money come from?  Why couldn’t we have accessed it before and bought loads of new hospitals?  If the local authorities have so many millions spare that they can invest in foreign banks why keep putting up council tax so steeply each year?

One ‘expert’ on the news this morning said that it was common practice for councils to have money in many different bank accounts to spread the risk.  Ok, fair enough, but that means there’s even more millions stashed away then all over the place!  Well, I’m sorry but when I visited my old school a few months ago and saw that it was literally falling apart I presumed it was because the local authority was completely skint not because they were too busy sitting on a fortune playing around deciding which off shore bank account to stash it in.

Also, hasn’t there been talk for months about Icelandic banks being in trouble?  Why on earth didn’t the financial boffins in local authorities do something sooner?  Too arrogant with our money perhaps?  Now it’s all gone wrong, they want the government to bail them out so the tax payer will lose out either way by having taxes used to save the day or council tax being put up because the money is lost.

What’s the point in giving £500 billion (gosh, I can’t even comprehend that sort of money!) to the banks if there is no obligation attached to force them to start lending to each other?  What’s to stop them just taking the money, saying thank you very much, and holding onto it to make the CEOs even richer?

It’s a mess as far as I can see and the whole crisis just seems to have exposed a whole load of incompetence and greed.

So as I am a taxpayer do I now own shares in a bank? Oh great, perhaps now I can force them to open on a Saturday every week

Agree with Charlie? Post your comments below.