With Iceland on eBay and the world on the rocks, this is another Berlin Wall moment

Iceland went on sale on eBay today. Reuters reports. More from the Telegraph here.

The listing, of course, has now vanished.

It does sound like the Internet equivalent of a painting by Dali. But then so does the Times' front page this evening:

Senior UK sources at the IMF in Washington conceded tonight that if the British Government's £400 billion bailout fails, the only option left to stabilise the economy and financial system could be wholesale nationalisation of the UK banking system.

The gravest warning so far during the global financial crisis came after one of the worst days on stock markets since the 1987 crash as panic selling swept around the globe, wiping an estimated $831 billion from the value of banks and industrial companies world-wide.

Finance ministers and central bank chiefs from the world's big economies have been striving for weeks to quell the panic and fear ravaging global markets with plans to shore up their banks and prevent a full-scale meltdown of the world financial system.

As the Treasury was set to reveal details of the British bailout plan, sources at the IMF warned that, if this failed, then the only option would be the wholesale nationalisation of the British banking system.

More here.

I'm really not looking to gloat here at all. This is a dreadful set of circumstances with consequences that simply do not bear thinking about. Yet we do, in the end, have to think about them - and seriously. I work in the financial services sector myself. I know what workers in that industry are going through. It's not a pretty sight.

But it does begin to feel as if this might be another Berlin Wall moment. A durable - and painful - fixture in our lives suddenly becomes nothing more than a puff pastry passage into irrelevance. Time can sometimes erode even the strongest of wills. It can sometimes erode even the will to be on top.

Not always. Not on every occasion. But sometimes it does.

Germany reshaped Europe when it reunited East and West. The Labour Party, with Brown at its head, now has an untold opportunity to reshape the world.