Just for once, let’s hear it for the man in the street. More specifically, for the prudent and attentive citizens queueing outside branches of Northern Rock, or filling in forms from other lenders to transfer tax-free accounts. Some of the men-in-the-street may have gone a bit far, like the doughty spirit who barricaded a manager into her office because she wouldn’t hand over his million quid on the ground that it was an internet-only account. But given that the fragile Rock’s website had crashed under the weight of traffic, he had a point. And he had a right to make it: it was his money. No, salute the queuers for their nerve, patience and admirable impermeability to patronising advice.

For how dare the stuffed suits, financial and political (and indeed journalistic), use expressions like “Don’t panic” and “Keep calm”. The withdrawers are perfectly entitled to choose who looks after their lavishly pretaxed savings. Some of them actually need money right now – like the chap on the news who wanted to pay his builder – and others just prefer not to rely on an institution that goes begging to the “lender of last resort”.

By their presence on the streets, most of it not at all panicky in demeanour, the queuers utter a resounding raspberry to the financial industry and its political masters. It is time someone did.

I lose count of the anodyne fibs that savers were told in the early stages. The Bank of England, it said, were propping up Northern Rock because it considers it basically sound, not a problem. What? Implicit in that statement is the more unnerving idea that it wouldn’t prop it up if things looked worse. They might well get worse; anything can deteriorate in the financial world, because common sense has long been jettisoned in favour of buccaneering and bravado. Everybody knows that we have a vast debt crisis, and where there are disproportionate debts there will eventually be a disproportionate number of defaulters. Which means trouble for banks. Work it out for yourself. So yes, it could get worse.

BACKGROUND

• Goldman Sachs steps into Northern Rock crisis

• ‘We did not let down our investors’ says chairman

• Northern is not just a bank, it’s our bank

• Northern Rock still lending ‘recklessly’

• Star investor stays bullish on banks

Man who stepped into limelight on a dark day

Alistair Darling, the Cabinet stalwart who shunned headlines, has become the Chancellor facing down a grave economic crisis

• Narrow Squeak

Brown points way to election fight

In an exclusive interview, the PM explains why ‘intensifying’ health service reforms will be the cornerstone of his appeal

• The most damaging run has been on our trust in you, prime minister

• Full transcript: Gordon Brown interview

• The Trivial Pursuit question Gordon is wary of asking voters

Related Internet Links

• Northern Rock company information

• Northern Rock share price charts

• Northern Rock company forecasts

Shareholders, obviously, have to bite the bullet – bad luck, but shareholders choose to gamble. But why should modest cash savers suffer? In the early stages of the crisis there were countless reassurances that savings were safe. Commentators said proudly that British savers are protected by “some of the strongest regulation in the world”.

Yet on scanning the details, you notice that if a bank goes bust only your first £2,000 is guaranteed, and 90 per cent of the next £33,000. Beyond that, nothing. Until Alistair Darling’s panicky promise last night, it was clear that the maximum compensation was the usual £31,700, even if your life savings were 20 times that amount. It could be your security for old age, or the price of a home you just sold to buy a new one.

The queuers were not stupid: even the loss of a few hundred pounds seems an unfair fine for using a respectable, mainstream bank with an umipressive rate of interest. Nor can ISA funds be snatched out quickly; that “only” £2 billion was withdrawn in two days, as the cheery BBC chap said yesterday, can be partly ascribed to the fact that transferring a tax-free savings account to another lender is a slow and tedious business, and that savers may be unwilling to jettison ten years’ worth of tax concessions. Mr Darling may have fended off this crisis – at a cost – but the lack of trust in financial institutions will take longer to mend.

We are dealing here with prudent people, remember, not grasshoppers but ants. If we boring savers had wanted to gamble, we’d have swopped the anoraks for tight sparkly tops, gone to Vegas with the grasshoppers and had a bit of fun. That Northern Rock chose to gamble with expansionist dreams and incautious lending is not our fault.

But then, neither was it our fault when we were mis-sold endowment policies on a promise they would surely pay off our mortgages “with a nice bonus on top”, only to be subsequently sent letters saying oops! They’d only pay off half of it. Or when Equitable Life, having run into a morass of trouble and miscalculation during which it managed to raise its chief executive’s pay by 35 per cent, imposed an “exit penalty” of 20 per cent on anyone whose confidence in it failed. In some cases this meant more recent investors actually getting back less money than they originally put in. Nor was there any guilt in the royally shafted employees and pensioners of Maxwell companies (Maxwell having been checked and given a clean bill of health only months earlier by government regulators). Nor can you point the finger at the thousands who saw a whole working life’s pension contributions vanish when their employers went bust, and at whose plight government shrugged.

So why should Northern Rock savers believe a word that British financiers or the Government say? All may be well in the end, but why risk it? We have grown wearily cynical about the smooth blandishments of the man from the National Equitable Profitable & Hardly At All Dodgy Assurance Company, and the “independent” advisers who take his commission. We are sick of being told not to panic, only to glance at our prosaic, risk-averse savings and notice a well-manicured bankerly hand dipping into them.

Nope, we’ll panic all we like, thanks. And if – as prosing commentators say – this drives Northern Rock farther into the dungheap, creates a national banking “crisis” and trouble for ex-Chancellor Brown, so what?

Those who run these companies (16 per cent pay rises at the top of Northern Rock this year) have not the slightest compunction in looking out for Number One. Nor does the financially featherbedded political class. Serves them right.

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