Harman's Outrage: Day 2

Monday, 2nd March 2009

Harriet Harman's proposal for legislation designed to target a single person - Sir Fred Goodwin - who, whatever his other failings, has not yet been charged wth any crime, seem even more extraordinary today than they did yesterday. Daniel Hannan puts the matter into some historical context:

Harriet Harman is proposing that a law be introduced aimed at a specific individual, retrospectively to criminalise something that was legal at the time. Such laws were known mediaevally as Acts of Attainder: they declared someone guilty after the event, and with no trial. Attainder Bills were introduced very rarely, usually following a gross abuse of ministerial power or an open insurrection. The last Act of Attainder was passed against Lord Edward Fitzgerald after the failure if the United Irishmen rising of 1798. Since then, Britain has been governed more or less according to constitutional rule.

Quite so, Yet the truly striking thing about Harman's proposal was how little outrage if occasioned. The BBC's Ten O'Clock News led with the story and treated it as a technical matter - would the government be able to "claw back" Sir Fred's pension - and ignored the political, ethical, legal and moral elements of Harman's outrageous proposal. That the BBC should willingly swallow the government's line was hardly a surprise; nor, sadly, was Wee Georgie Osbourne's disinclination to attack Harman's preposterous presumption. Instead he too played up the line that the government had, essentially, "signed-off" on Goodwin's pension. This too was to miss the forest for the trees, even if, politically-speaking, it was the "safe" play.

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Frank Smith

March 2nd, 2009 1:46pm Report this comment

Good points. The treatment by the BBC News is a scary indictment of them - not only lefties, but brainless lefties who cannot think for themselves! Quite astonishing.

Donna

March 2nd, 2009 3:42pm Report this comment

Mmm, more safe play by the opposition. Surely the government has dug itself a big enough hole that we can afford to be a little more adventurous?

As for the BBC, I've come to expect nothing of them whatsoever rather than be disappointed at every turn.

hadrian

March 2nd, 2009 4:48pm Report this comment

Never mind- we can always then petition for another Act of Attainder- this time against one Gordon Brown, who after all, was complicit enough with the arraigned banker as to ennoble him. However repunant the culture Fred inculcated at his bank, one feels he's fast becoming the sacrificial lamb that Labour hopes will appease an offended populace, vox populi, being vox Dei- and the BBC as Labour's prophets and priests in the religion of Statist Hypocrisy.

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