Banking (Special Provisions) Bill

Indeed. The quality of the assets in Granite is higher than the quality of the assets remaining in Northern Rock, and it will have the ability to take what other good assets remain in Northern Rock. As the Chief Secretary is here, I would like to ask her another question—again, she may not be prepared to answer it: why is there such urgency over the suspension of shares? One of the main planks in her argument for the haste with which we are having to consider this nationalisation Bill—we are doing so in one day: today—is that it is vital for shareholders to have some clarity about their future. The shareholders know that Northern Rock is going to be nationalised; the shares are suspended. It is perfectly normal corporate practice when shares are suspended these days for resumption to take weeks, and in some cases months. It is not a legitimate argument to pin the speed of nationalisation on the issue of suspension. Finally, I would like to point out another commercial practice, in relation to administration. This point was missed by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris), which is surprising given his legal background and his understanding of corporate law. The administration arrangements were set up to mirror in the UK legal context what happens in the US under chapter 11, under which businesses can be taken into administration to protect them from their creditors, not to wind them up or declare them insolvent. The purpose of an administration is to provide a protective umbrella, under which the administrator takes steps to restore the company to health. That is precisely what my hon. Friends on the Front Bench have proposed, but Government Members have consistently obfuscated the issue or misunderstood it.