There's something more deep rooted at play here, and it might even have its origins in "they're 45 minutes away". It strikes me that there's been something of a collective
'don't believe you' verdict delivered by the British public to the government, and lets be honest, there's nothing like money being at stake to bring this out. Northern Rock issued a profits warning originally, which shouldn't have been enough to start up a run. Then a ravenous 24 hour media got stuck in, and not surprisingly people started to panic.
Banks have been part of the problem for years in their irresponsible lending and in no small part have created a 'casino economy' with a degree of assurance that central government can't afford for them to go broke and have to bail them out. To no small extent the government's culpabale in doing nothing to stop the banks (you might argue that in a free market there's nothing they can do) but some of their lending decisions have been extremely devisive, and threten to have wide ranging ramifications for generations and especially amongst the younger cohorts, who've had the property ladder kicked out from under them.
Basically, we've had something of a speculative bubble building up around the price of property which if not on the South Sea Company proportions (which ironically involved the national debt) isn't massively removed in principal. What's happened is that we've had the emergence of a 'property rich' and a 'property poor' class. The former are using the ever mushrooming and the exponential growth in their properties value to underwrite the taking out of equity to fuel a personal spending regime they couldn't otherwise hope to sustain if lending were aligned to their income, rather than secured against this artifically induced collateral. The banks have been all to happy to lend, without necessarily realising that the foundations are built on sand. As Chancellor Gordon Brown relied on this artifically created spending boom to fuel the economy, and in no small part this is what's kept our economy performing ahead of our major competitors. Unfortunately, it was built on consumer debt and underwritten by something that isn't worth what we believe it is in terms of bricks and mortar, but needs protecting thus in order to stop the bubble bursting.
It's one of the reasons I suspect that all these new afordable homes for the 'property poor' and excluded cohorts have never been built. If the supply suddenly started to match demand, then the silly prices that houses have been allowed to inflate to would start to correct, leaving the greedy individuals who've stoked up the market, and used their property as collateral to buy up more (hence reducing supply) and the reckless banks high and dry.
Faced with this prospect, and in the finest traditions of a labour party
'a labour party' (to be read in mock Kinnock accent) have chosen to shaft those in society who are in most need (which has always been their way historically). That is to say, they've decided that the creation of a 'property poor' generation is acceptable, and forced them into a punitive rental sector trap that just eats into anything they earn in such a way that means they'll never get a disposbale income or a mortgage, until their parents die.
You might argue that the poorest people in society have always been excluded? You'd be right. But the people who this is impacting on are increasingly middle to middle upper income earners, single people, and young couples. It threatens to become extremely devisive.
The last crisis I can remember that threatend to spin out of control was in the early 80's when once again it was American lending (although this time to assorted developing countries that sparked it). Basically the dollar had got too high, and South America defaulted which left Chase Manhattan, Manufacturers Hanover, and Continental Illinois all saying that unless the central reserve stepped in they would be looking at going bust. Clearly, this was a tad embarrasing to the free market principals of Ronald O'Reagan, but since the equivilant in the UK would be like losing Nat West, Barclays, and HBOS in the space of 6 months, they had little choice, short of wiping out half your populations savings.
"It's only in mathematics that exponential curves grow to infinity. In real life they either gently saturate or dramatically collapse"
- Denis Gabor (if memory serves me right - Nobel prize winner?)