REUTERS/Stephen Hird
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Britain came within hours of the breakdown of law and order during the 2008 financial crisis.
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That's according to ex-chancellor Alistair Darling.
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Darling told Business Insider that had the government not bailed out RBS, panic would have gripped the country.
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"It sent a tremor down my back," Darling said of a call from RBS' chairman warning him the bank was on the brink of collapse.
Britain came within hours of "the breakdown of law and order" on the day the government was forced to bail out RBS at the heart of the 2008 financial crisis, Britain's chancellor at the time, Alistair Darling told Business Insider.
Darling, now a member of the House of Lords said that there were genuine concerns prior to the bail out of RBS in October 2008, that the collapse of the bank could lead to violence in Britain's streets.
"Gordon [Brown] and I were faced with the imminent collapse of what was then the world's biggest bank, we were very clear that if RBS had collapsed, it would have brought down the entire system with it," Darling told Business Insider in an interview.
Had the government failed to bail RBS out, Darling said, it "would have had to close its doors, switch off the cash machines."
That in turn, Darling said, would have caused "complete panic" among the British public.
"I think you'd have had complete panic with people realising they couldn't get their money," he said.
"If you can't get your money you can't buy food, you can't buy petrol etc. There was a grave risk of going from an economic crisis to a political crisis, where you have a breakdown of law and order. We were that close to the brink."
RBS was the biggest beneficiary of the British government's near £40 billion bailout programme during the crisis, which sought to stop the UK's major lenders from going under. Nearly 10 years after the bailout, RBS is still majority owned by the British taxpayer.
Darling described the morning before the bailout was announced as the "scariest moment" of the crisis, when he received a call from RBS chairman Tom McKillop while attending a meeting of European finance ministers.
McKillop told Darling that RBS was "haemorrhaging money, and asked what we were going to do about it. I said 'We've got a plan ready to go, how long can you last?'"