I've also been musing on the historic significance of tonight's events, and I think it can perhaps be seen as the death of Thatcherism, or at least of an important strand of the dominant ideology of the 1980s and 1990s.
It was Margaret Thatcher who in a series of bold reforms from 1979 onwards gave the City the freedom to trade in everything and anything.
She removed restrictive practices, she encouraged the free flow of capital to and from anywhere in the world, she created the notion of the City as the Great British Success.
For the liberalisation of the City to end with a quartet of our biggest and proudest banks being forced to put out the begging bowl to Government, well that is a moment in ecnomic history - which may well, ultimately, be as significant as the nationalisations of the 1940s and the privatisations of the 1980s.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2008/10/humbling_of_our_banks.html
