I must admit that I did not immediately grasp the obvious parallels between the decision to strip a banker of his knighthood and the brutal murder of hundreds of American blacks at the hands of a mass white supremacist paramilitary organisation.
So I am thankful to Lord Digby Jones, a man who served as trade minister under Labour, for bringing the comparison to my attention. The erstwhile head of the Confederation of British Industry believes that the treatment dealt out to Fred Goodwin earlier this week carries ‘the faint whiff of the lynch mob on the village green’ about it. Continue reading
I’m almost feeling sorry for Fred the Shred. ‘Humbling of Mister Godwin’, mocked the Daily Mail; ‘Goodwin is shredded’ (geddit?) bellowed the Daily Telegraph; ‘Once A Knight Fred’, echoed the Sun, a newspaper always keen to win the most imaginative pun stakes.
RBS crashed in 2008, costing taxpayers £45.5bn to bail it out. The FSA (Financial Services Authority) report published today (482 pages long!) indicts everyone – Blair, Brown and Balls for insisting on ‘light-touch regulation’ (i.e. the bank could do whatever it wanted), Cameron and Osborne for demanding even less regulation, and itself – the FSA supervision was ‘flawed’ and ‘provided insufficient challenge’ to the bank (i.e. it let the bank get away with whatever the bank wanted to do). It’s an appalling story of incompetence, arrogance, and anti-regulatory ideological prejudice. So who’s been punished for costing the country £45bn? 
How did the super-rich get away with flaunting the extreme and disgusting excesses of wealth for so long, without hardly a ripple of disapproval? And why is the issue now being propelled to the front of the political agenda, first by the August riots and now only 2 months later by Occupy LSX? 
Maybe Ed Miliband’s inner social democrat thinks that it is clever politics to combine a spot of banker bashing with a ritual middle market tabloid-style denunciation of dole scroungers.