Northern Rock — the failed private institution bailed out with taxpayers’ money by Gordon Brown because of Labour Party connections — is about to cut another 2,000 jobs after already cutting 1,300 earlier this year.

The bank, which plunged to a £585m loss in the first half of the year, said it needed to shrink its workforce through a combination of redundancies and natural wastage to achieve its cost-reduction targets.

A plan to offload surplus office buildings in Newcastle and Sunderland was also under way.

Since nationalisation, Northern Rock has been given at least £26.9bn from the Bank of England in direct subsidies, after gambling away its own reserves on the insane ’subprime’ mortgage market to supply Mexican and other Third World invaders in the USA with housing.

Goldman Sachs, which advised the government on the best way forward for Northern Rock, has informed the government that it could lose between £450m and £1.28bn because the bank will find it impossible to redeem the number of mortgages it needs to repay the loan.

The redundancies, of which 800 were compulsory and 500 through voluntary terms, will, along with natural wastage, help reduce Northern Rock’s workforce to 4,500 from 6,000.

The bank expects natural turnover to eliminate a further 500 jobs by 2011, reducing its employee headcount to the targeted 4,000 level.