UK's Brown faces grilling on bank nationalisation

London: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown faces a grilling on Monday after the government said it would take ailing bank Northern Rock into public ownership.

The move would be the first nationalisation of Britain's fifth-largest mortgage lender since the 1970s.

Finance minister Alistair Darling is due to announce new legislation allowing the government to take over.

The mortgage lender has been put on the government's books, classified as around 90 billion pounds of public debt.

Opposition politicians blame Brown for the crisis, pointing to the regulatory framework he put in place a decade ago when he was finance minister under Tony Blair.