Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

See if you can work out what is going on , and . Rita Hayworth and the finale to Tristan and Isolde. Rita Hayworth and Softly Awakes My Heart from Samson and Delila. Rita Hayworth montaged with Chopin.

We are less than five years into the rise of social networking and self-publication and it's already giving rise to new forms of human behaviour. The fascinating thing is, though, how redolent of old, even ancient, forms of behaviour our online activity is.

I've reported before on Newsnight about death rituals inside multiplayer games; new forms of ancestor worship on genealogy sites and the re-emergence of "Cartesian dualism", where people begin to conceive of their online self as a separate entity, much as Descartes conceived the mind as a separate material entity from the body.

What I think is going on in these lovingly crafted schmaltzy "tribute" videos is also quasi-religious. It is a kind of beatification. And it's just part of the wider re-emergence of collective memory that the social media has opened up.

is fascinating in this regard. We are opening up whole layers of past experience that have been forgotten and buried. If you are, for example, a Rita Hayworth fan the base layer is ripped-off clips of the best bits of her movies.

Then you get fairly straightforward biographical pieces like (although the YouTube movie makers can never seem to resist montaging Rita against 19th century opera).

And on top of that, clips from .

Switch from Rita to less palatable memories of the 1940s and there is a lot out there in YouTube land. The Nazi Horst Wessel Lied comes in just as many formats as Rita Hayworth tributes, and you can also watch Nazi wartime propaganda videos that are still banned in Germany.

Now, while I think these can be valuable source material for historians and students, my guess is that a lot of this stuff is not being watched for that reason, but for the general purpose of hate-nostalgia.

I will not post any links to them, but there are hundreds of Nazi-nostalgia videos on YouTube, including photos of modern housewives with swastika cake-icing decoration tips.

It is not all pernicious. As a result of the geeky obsessions of individuals, nostalgia has become a giant industry on YouTube. Remember the Singing Ringing Tree? (I had nightmares about that dwarf as a kid!).

Want to know what a cotton mill was like in the '30s, and what kind of cheesy movies will get produced if we enter a Depression again? .

One of my own geeky obsessions is the 1930s dance band Orlando and his Orchestra, for the simple reason that my grandfather played clarinet with them. Until today I've managed to assemble MP3s of maybe five or six tracks by them. But while writing this blog I absent-mindedly typed in the name of a singer who worked for them and it came up with .

The interesting thing here is that it's been uploaded by a German 78 record collector. And because of the way YouTube is indexed, you tend to find a lot more searching YouTube than you would if you simply searched Google.

What all this is about is, ultimately, the human memory and its interaction with emotions like loss, nostalgia, idealisation.

It fascinates me because almost everything produced by amateurs on YouTube has a clear subtext, whether it's "I'm really a Nazi" or "I would like women to go back to being like Rita Hayworth".

Whereas when people blog, and above all when they are social networking, the discourse is mainly "text" not subtext. Just look at all your friends who are under the age of 35 on and, generally, their profile photos say "How cool am I?".

The Facebook discourse is literal, straightforward. The YouTube montage is complex, subtextual and takes us into areas of psychology few people would normally want to expose themselves to in public. There's a whole other aspect of historical memory opening up right now on , as well, which I'll explore in a future blogpost.

What does it mean? Where is it all leading?

I don't know. One of the most challenging things about this rapid emergence of new forms of communication is that there's almost no academic work going on about it, and what research is being done is fragmented across many different disciplines.

Many people still find it hard to accept that the online world is part of reality. Sarah Palin famously had a go at the US government for funding research into fruit flies in Paris, so I can't imagine public funding for research into online funeral rituals inside getting rave reviews in some quarters.

I will open it up to the collective wisdom of the Newsnight crowd. Is all this stuff evidence of mass psychological disturbance or are we using the internet to make ourselves psychologically healthier by searching out our fears, fantasies and lost memories?

. But the FSA released a statement saying that "were taken seriously, and were properly and professionally investigated". It also revealed this about a KPMG report commissioned by the FSA into the case:

"the KPMG report also indicated that there was no evidence in the report that Mr Moore was dismissed due to being excessively robust in the discharge of his functions".

On the basis of this some newspaper commentators have declared Mr Moore's charges, first made on the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ2 Money Programme and amplified on Newsnight, "without merit".

Today, Mr Moore has hit back. He has sent me the original response his lawyers drew up to the KPMG report. It states:

"the [KPMG] Report is imbalanced and has arrived at conclusions which, if reviewed by an external independent tribunal, would not be supported".

And he has issued a new statement through his lawyers:

"The KPMG Report itself was limited in scope. Indeed KPMG have accepted this themselves, so we would argue it never covered the essential issues raised by our client."

Mr Moore says that, 10 days after he responded to the KPMG report, HBOS settled his claim for compensation.

None of this is conclusive, but it means that two substantive allegations made by Paul Moore remain on the table and need to be answered by the FSA, the government and anybody concerned with the fiasco that happened at HBOS. They are:

a) That HBOS was at risk of breaching banking regulations because its aggressive sales culture, developed to expand the retail bank (i.e. the Halifax) in the early part of this decade, was running faster than the internal checks and balances designed to protect customers. So, in a document NOT released by the FSA last night, but which I can reveal, the regulator told HBOS:

"There has been evidence that development of the control function in the Retail Division has not kept pace with the increasingly sales driven operation...There is a risk that the balance of experience amongst senior management could lead to a culture which is overly sales focused and which gives inadequate priority to risk issues." (FSA Arrow Assessment and Risk Mitigation Programme, 1 December 2003)

b) That his attempts to raise his concerns were met with "adversarial, emotional and personal" responses at senior level. That there was a "cultural indisposition to challenge". Ultimately, he claims, he was forced to circulate himself comments that the official distribution mechanisms to the board had failed to distribute. I have seen evidence that his managers were annoyed about the "cc list" of the relevant email.

Moore's third charge was that he was sacked by Crosby on the pretext of the restructuring of his role and replaced by somebody who was not competent to do the job. This was what the KPMG report considered and it concluded that the selection of his replacement was handled correctly and that she was suitable for the job.

I have seen the letter James Crosby wrote to Paul Moore, in which it says the decision to abolish Moore's role and consider replacing him with somebody else "mine and mine alone". (Letter from James Crosby, 23 November 2004). We have it in black and white that Crosby initiated the process that led to Moore being sacked. What we are left with is "no evidence" that this was due to Moore being "excessively robust". And note the FSA's precise language:

"The report concludes that the report contains no evidence..."

Clearly the dispute between the two men will continue, as will Moore's criticism of the FSA. But the episode poses a wider question.

Last night's FSA statement outlined the chronology of its involvement with HBOS. Let's be clear the risks identified were to customers, because of the danger of mis-selling products through high pressure. However, this was an alarm bell that could have also flagged up the problem that eventually sank HBOS: to find the money to lend so aggressively, they went to the money markets and borrowed it.

Here's the timeline:

Late 2002 the FSA identifies the problem.

1 December 2003, the FSA's report identifies the problems that Paul Moore has to sort out.

18 December 2003. Gordon Brown appoints Crosby to the post of non-executive board member of the FSA itself, saying:

"I am delighted to announce these appointments. James Crosby is a leading industry practitioner with a wealth of experience in banking, fund management and the insurance field, and will bring a new perspective to the Board."

8 November 2004. Paul Moore is told he'll be sacked.

16 June: Crosby is knighted and asked to head a taskforce overcoming opposition to the introduction of ID cards.

29 June 2006. FSA writes again to HBOS saying there are "still control issues" and that "the growth strategy of the group posed risks to the whole group and that these risks must be managed and mitigated".

December 2007: Crosby is made deputy chairman of the FSA*

Thus, for three years Sir James Crosby was simultaneously in charge of a bank known to be at risk of breaching its regulatory obligations, and a member of the board of the regulator, indeed its deputy chairman.

The first question for the FSA is: how was this handled? What internal mechanisms were put in place to acknowledge that FSA operational staff may have to deal with problems arising with a bank run by a member of the board.

The second question is: when Sir James Crosby was originally appointed to the board of the FSA, was Gordon Brown personally made aware of the FSA's concerns about the bank's strategy?

* Thanks to those who pointed out this was in the wrong place in the original chronology.

Following Newsnight's exclusive interview last night, with HBOS whistleblower Paul Moore, the deputy chairman of the Financial Services Authority has resigned. Sir James Crosby was the man who built HBOS, from the merger of Halifax and the Bank of Scotland, leaving it to the stewardship of Andy Hornby in 2006. In 2008 it collapsed and had to be part-nationalised.

I must admit to being stunned that the revelations from Mr Moore, made under parliamentary privilege, have led to this. Here is why. Last October I broadcast the substantive revelations of Paul Moore in a Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ2 Money Programme Special: HBOS - Breaking the Bank. Since then both HBOS, and the FSA have known the essential focus of the allegations:

- that Paul Moore was sacked by because he had raised problems with the bank's culture when it came to regulatory risk under Crosby
- that the decision to change his job description, and then employ somebody else to do the job was said Crosby "mine and mine alone"

What puzzles me is why the simple revelation in public of Sir James' alleged role in the sacking should prompt his resignation. It must have been on the radar of the government and FSA for months - so why does the publication make a difference?

The FSA is in the middle of a massive re-examination of its role and past performance under its new boss Adair Turner. Sir James clearly believed that staying on would damage the FSA, either reputationally or hamper it practically: that is the import of his statement. But it goes to the heart of the problem: the FSA, many in the finance industry believe, was "captured" by the banks it was supposed to regulate.

Lord Turner up to now has tried to address this issue in two ways: a strictly limited inquiry into the handling of Northern Rock, which found mistakes and a wider theoretical rethink of the role of regulators, national and global. What he has resisted - and what is repeatedy resisted by the FSA's press spokespeople - is any systematic "revisiting" of the past. This, I believe will now have to happen.

There is no suggestion of individual culpability: it is clear however that the FSA, which has the responsibility to maintain financial stability, failed. Its key executives and board members are political appointees. Gordon Brown, as chancellor, appointed Sir James - the man whose strategy of rapid growth laid the basis for the collapse of HBOS.

So this is not about Crosby. Or the four bank execs who said sorry. And the question of who is right or wrong in the claim and counterclaim between Paul Moore and HBOS is secondary to a bigger issue. There was systemic failure and the role of the regulator is now right in the spotlight. How can you have a policing body overseen by those who are to be policed? How can you have the deputy chairman of the FSA being the same person who designed the strategy that, arguably, crashed a major bank?

This is the essential conundrum of UK financial regulation. I said last night: the whole financial elite is now in disarray. However strongly you feel about their role in the crash, we need that financial elite to recover its array pretty quickly and come up with a story about how the regulation of British banking is to be put right. And a plan.

* Watch Newsnight's special tonight on the state of Britain's jobs market, 2230 GMT. We will be covering the latest in the Crosby case at the top of the programme.

There is a dangerous mismatch between what politicians are doing and what people are feeling. I've been on a road trip through the English Midlands to take the temperature of the jobs market. It's cool and cooling, but people's frustrations are going in the opposite direction.

In the first place is the : it's simmering in the public consciousness, because it is seen as manifestly unfair that bankers get bailed out while ordinary businesses do not. The government's decision to launch an inquiry led by a banker, however intentioned, looks to the average person tapping the touch screen in the Job Centre like an exercise in circumlocution.

Next is the issue of migration. The "British Jobs for British Workers" issue has not gone away because of the settlement of the dispute. The militants who ran the strike are now looking at the Olympic Games venue, where there's been a reported surge in migrants registering for National Insurance numbers. But independent of what the union activists do, the issue has been placed firmly out there in the public consciousness. The LOR dispute was atypical in that any pressure on wages and resources created by East European migrants is, say economists, felt at the low end of the income scale. This, I am pretty certain based on anecdotal evidence, is where the greatest hostility to migrants is being expressed.

A third issue is politicians themselves. For the past few days I've had the chance to ask ordinary people - minicab drivers, railway passengers, youths on street corners - "what should the government do?" It's usually greeted with a guilty grin and a shrug of the shoulders indicating they don't give a fig. "The politicians can't do anything," is something I have heard spontaneously more than once. Listen carefully: people tend to talk about "the politicians" negatively in general (which is bad news for the opposition). And while a few politicians may draw satisfaction that people think they "can't do anything", I do not think these comments are meant to exonerate them.

"It can't get any worse"

There's one other bit of zeitgeist out there that I hadn't expected. A cab driver put it this way: "The people I pick up are single mums, students, people on long-term sick, pensioners... how much worse can it get for people like that? The credit crunch won't really affect them because they're already at rock bottom: it can't get any worse." And if you think about it there is a whole layer of the UK population that is cushioned from falling income by benefits. Every ticket you print out at the Job Centre points out, at the bottom, that if a job is on or around the minimum wage you will be entitled to tax credits. What I think is happening is that people at the low-wage end of the jobs market are presuming they will just get another low-paid job. This "our lives are crap already" mood is something I just don't think politicians are hearing. You could take heart from it, because it's the source of the doggedness in British people that got them through the War and the Depression. However, you would not want to get yourself on the opposite side to them in this mood.

Now these are just impressions, and the politicians normally have an even better mechanism for keeping their fingers on the pulse of mass feeling: a political party. But many senior Labour backbenchers are warning that their party has become "hollowed out". I passed through , where the BNP has won 29 council seats out of sixty, and the Labour Party is down to sixteen. [Update: Thanks to all those who pointed out my error regarding the number of BNP councillors in Stoke, the correct figure is nine.] A senior member of the party in the Potteries told me the party mechanisms have "collapsed"; "If you want your drains fixed you go to the BNP," they said. Meanwhile there is no bailout for the last major ceramic factory, , where 350 people were made redundant at one day's notice last month.

Obviously all the main political parties have vibrant and real relationships with that part of the UK population that reads the Telegraph or Guardian, or watches Newsnight. But seasoned political operators know that is not what constitutes a relationship with the masses. (I will add that both Labour and Conservatives have recently brought back seasoned political operators to frontbench positions.) So I have a hunch that the sheer scale of discontent and fractiousness in the country are being under-estimated. The latter-day substitute for parties - private focus groups - will be picking this up, but probably not as viscerally.

Labour Party problem

Finally, there is a specifically Labour Party problem. On several occasions in the past few weeks mid-ranking people inside the Labour party and trade union movement have asked me privately: "Are we finished?" Theories are circulating about whether actions in government are being taken with a view to shaping the party in opposition. For thoughts like these to cross the minds of ministers would be self-destructive - so no sensible politician can allow themselves to think that way. But outside the inner circles this is the mental conversation the Labour movement is having with itself.

On a day when the CBI is saying the credit crunch is getting worse for companies, and the is predicting three million unemployed, there is a lot of what anthropologists call "social noise" at the statistical level of reality. But around the mass emotional impact of this recession, there is "social silence", except in the tabloid newspapers and on the social networking sites.

Thus the UK political class, and much of the media, finds itself at a bit of a disadvantage. Last week I saw Chinese premier Wen Jia Bao on the TV with Gordon Brown. It occurred to me that the Chinese Communist Party, through its networks of mass surveillance, probably has a better handle on the mood of Chinese people than any politician in the UK system could have on the mood of people in Britain, given the professionalisation of politics and the hollowing out of parties.

Tomorrow I'll blog about the people I met on my journey. My report will be shown on a Newsnight special, Wednesday at 10.30pm, on the day we expect unemployment to top two million.

In Friday's Newsnight report on the strikes against foreign-only hiring practices we ran an early version of the Gordon Brown "British jobs" speech, at the TUC Conference in 2007. It's been pointed out on blog that at his Labour Party Conference speech two weeks later he was even more categoric:

"As we set out on the next stage of our journey this is our vision: Britain leading the global economy - by our skills and creativity, by our enterprise and flexibility, by our investment in transport and infrastructure - a world leader in science; a world leader in financial and business services; a world leader in energy and the environment from nuclear to renewables; a world leader in the creative industries; and yes - modern manufacturing too - drawing on the talents of all to create British jobs for British workers."

I will just point this out in the interests of accuracy.

Meanwhile, the slogan itself is coming under much discussion on the strikers' . Those with access to the bulletin board have sent me long list of postings in the last 24 hours concerned with far right inflitration of the strike, and objecting to the use of the slogan.

Interestingly, there is also a lively discussion on the BB about whether the main union involved, Unite, should stop paying its dues to Labour. Since this super-union has begun gearing up to more or less run Labour's next election campaign, it adds another political dimension to the strike.

Even more interesting is the fact that this is probably the first UK industrial action to be organised using the internet. In addition to the Bearfacts website, there's a Facebook group with 12,000 members where, again, there's a lively discussion going on over whether the strike and the slogan is racist.