Fred Goodwin: Not The ONLY Scapegoat

Fred Goodwin it seems is feeling a bit picked on. You create a banking monolith, which becomes the pride of your country. You get ennobled… then all of a sudden you go for that big deal too far, and everything crashes all around you. Now everybody is trying to disown you, even those people who encouraged you in the good times.

Don’t get me wrong, Fred Goodwin deserves the vilification that he is getting, he almost sank a Scottish Institution. He deserves to be stripped of his knighthood, and deserves to be charged for Gross Negligence. He certainly doesn’t deserve his huge pension, when he has destroyed the lives of many others.

Problem is, there are others who deserve EXACTLY the same treatment, and they aren’t getting it. Those equally, and maybe more culpable, in sinking the UK’s economy. There were another 3 horsemen at the Treasury select committee 2 weeks ago, one of them Tom McKillop had the power to reign in the boy from Feegie, but decided not to.

This brings us to Brown. While the country burns, he fiddles. He accuses Cameron of doing nothing. Brown is all talk and no trousers, fumigating against tax dodgers and city spivs (I’m paraphrasing, of course), but really doing nothing. Brown is of course the very person who sold the Inland Revenue offices to a company (Mapely Steppes) based in a tax haven. The Treasury, under Brown, employed more advisors with agenda’s and conflicts of interests than even the Tories did under Thatch. That’s not even to mention the toothless tiger he created with the moniker FSA, gee that’s really going to scare them into doing the right thing.

Brown though still has time to do the right thing. The first thing he can do is sack Paul Myners, the guy who gave the RBS board the assent to pay Goodwin his obscene pension. For someone who was employed because he “knows” the city, he was either stitched up by the RBS board or knew what he was doing. Either way, he is as much use to the British taxpayer as a chocolate fireguard, and should be sacked because of his incompetence.