Fred shredded down to size

geoffm

One wonders in Alex Salomon was consulted on this as he offered Mr Goodwin his support on the takeover of ABN. Though the whole episode looks like pandering to the masses

David Cockerham

I'd go a bit - a lot - further and say that all three main party leaders should make clear that no one who approves or accepts an obscenely generous bonus package on top of an obscenely generous salary will ever be successfully nominated for an honour while they are in power.

toco

Fred Goodwin,Gordon Brown and Alex Salmond!Not exactly the dream ticket for wellbeing and financial stability.Funny that 'never had a job' Red Ed is spinning like an out of control runaway train to nowhere.

Mudplugger

Petty and petulant.

How can this act of putulance be justified when the flagrant criminal Baroness Uddin can remain in the Lords, participating in the legislative process. Outrageous.

Simon Stephenson.

I appreciate that our leaders will be hoping for the exact opposite of this, but the important thing to bear in mind here is that the decisions Goodwin made were the same as would have been made by anyone else who'd progressed to the top of the elite of the '90s and '00s. Goodwin wasn't a rogue - he was absolutely typical of the successful businessman of those years.

Simon Stephenson.

(Continued)

And not only was he typical of the businessmen of that era, he was also just the sort of thrusting, tunnel-visioned risk-taker who appealed to the dreamworld dimwits who led New Labour (mirrored by those who now lead the Conservatives?) - a real break from past stuffiness, logic and precision that suited down to the socks a political movement based on the promotion of appearance and short-termism, and the belittling of measurable substance.

Goodwin's a scapegoat, no more, no less, and unless we understand this, we'll understand nothing about what went wrong.

Kittler

Perhaps we could honour those exceptional individuals who criticised Goodwin's stewardship of the bank before the crises.
Can't think of any myself. Anyone out there got a name, deserving a gong (services in respect of science of clairvoyance), be they from politics, business, or even the MEDIA.

Chris lancashire

This says far more about politicians than it does about Goodwin, bankers, et al.

nacion camba

Finally, a banker who is publicly dishonoured. Praise be to God! Let it not be forgot that justice can take decades to be done. Other captains of the banking industry may come to regret their own commanding roles in future years. This economic collapse of catastrophic proportions turns-out to harbour a new revolution in a highly indebited West. Some in the banking world might reflect on the fate of French aristocrats in the eighteenth century. While such brutal political justice is unthinkable in a humane climate, just outside your own unearthly gates of low interest rates is a baying mob paying great heights for credit.

Andy Leeds

You are wrong Simon Stephenson. Fred Goodwin was the driving force on the RBS board that ABN Amro without conducting due diligence. To put it in simple terms Fred the Shred had no idea what he was buying. This act of arrogance and hubris sank the bank.

And now Fred Goodwin has been humiliated what about calling Gordon Brown and Ed Balls to account too ??

2trueblue

It is nice for politicians to have agreed worldwide that the bankers are to blame for their incompetence. We had a period where governments borrowed to bloat their public sectors, and grow their own areas. All this was done in our name and on our money. We had no real leadership politically and frankly no one right now who has any idea how to guide us out of our present situation. What we do have is a lot of fresh air. Those who were in power have stepped away from their responsibilities and those who are now in power are powerless to fix it.

2trueblue

What we need to see is some leadership with a knowledgebase to get us through this. Liebore certainly have no idea and are only given airtime because the BBC are so far to the left we need to centre them, or get rid of them. The governments and economists did not see it coming so why should we listen to them? Brown, Bliar, Millipede, Balls, Cooper, are all architects of our present misery so anything they say is irrelevant.

cherami

Goodwin should be prosecuted. And he is not the only one. A lot of bankers on both sides of the Atlantic should be in gaol for, at the very least, hubristic incompetence. Certainly, Goodwin should be stripped of his bonuses and shares.

Paul

If we're going to be this sanctimonious and vindictive about bankers, could we at least do something to hack Gordon Brown off? Bar him from making his numerous appearances at the House of Commons perhaps (ho ho)

daniel maris

Simon Stephenson,

Scapegoats are sadly sometimes necessary. Derek Robinson, Red Robbo (a thoughtful man, trying to the best by the people he worked with), was made a scapegoat in the 1970s and lost his job as a result.

*ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Robinson_(trade_unionist)

No doubt Red Robbo didn't deserve the opprobrium heaped on him, but he was seen as symptomatic of a deep malaise in British industry at the time.

I think the same applies here. Fred Goodwin is symptomatic of a deep malaise in our economy which has to be addressed. Focussing on the money industry has led us close to a Greek style disaster.

Ruby Duck

Scapegoat?

He was the CEO of RBS for chrissake. It's his job to carry the can.

Clear Memories

So when to Brown and Balls get their comeuppance? It happened on Browns watch; he recommended this now-proven incompetent for his honour.

And Balls was whispering in his ear all the time, the sly little gobsh*te.

Clear Memories

daniel maris
February 1st, 2012 12:06am

As one who worked through that era as a supplier to Longbridge, Derek and his mates were not unfairly blamed - they got only a fraction of the approbrium they truly deserved.

The union movement at that time (and God help us if ever we go back) was an all-powerful protection racket for its members (as it remains today in the public sector). They could and often did bankrupt small businesses, blackball honest workers preventing them from working and protect the workshy, dishonest and corrupt.

It was their exploitation of weak management, not Thatchers policies, that destroyed the British industrial base. Thatcher set about backing management and putting in place the procedurtes to let them tame the Unions.

Sadly, industry was so debilitated that, by the time the union demon was exorcised, there was too little successful business left.

Bonzodog

Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un banker pour encourager les autres .....

Fergus Pickering

Pandering to the masses eh? I thought that was the point of democratic government, that you pandered to the masses i.e. did what they wanted. I take it you do not approve of all the guff talked about broken promises. After all, the promises were made to the masses, weren't they? And why should they be pandered to? Of course it's a matter of degree. I wouldn't hang him in public or burn down his house with his rich, undeserving family in it. No, I don't think I would. But I doubt if the masses would either, decent sticks at bottom, unlike, shall we say...

EC

Bring back Peter O' HanraHanrahan!

Did Goodwin ask for a knighthood in the first place? Does he really care that it has been taken away? No, all he really cares about is his pot of gold.

The only thing being shredded, or rather pulped, on a regular basis are unsold copies of the Speccie.

Baron

and this.

James Forsyth at his best: “But no one should kid themselves that the removal of Goodwin’s knighthood will do anything to help the economy. There is a far bigger picture to attend to”.

Would it help stopping global warming?

Sean Haffey

Isn't it time that honours were reserved for people who did something good and worthy, without significant reward? The highly-paid businessmen, sports stars and celebrities have already had their reward.

PayDirt

What a vindictive lot. Fred was only doing what seemed a good idea at the time. What a hateful bunch of oversized apes humans are.

Brian A

This witchhunt against bankers whether, the essentially blameless like Stephen Hester, or the culpable like Fred Goodwin, is deeply unedifying. It clearly suits the political and media classes to transfer the whole of the blame for our current financial mess on to the banks, however, there is plenty of blame to share around. Gordon Brown and his treasury team, together with a weak Bank of England and FSA, created the lax and poorly regulated economic context that encouraged an explosion of credit fuelled spending, while large sections of the media encouraged rampant consumerism. Yet, despite this blizzard of incompetence only bankers are blamed for their reckless lending and acquisitions - what about reckless borrowing and spending by both government and consumers?

nacion camba

@ 2trueblue 10:47
"no one right now who has any idea how to guide us out of our present situation."

Let such men as Fred Goodwin who come from naught, learn how to manage their own dishonour. If humanly possible, we need to remove their wealth with draconian fines. Yes, let Fred be swallowed up like Jonah the runaway.

I lead people like me & these times are of a glorious revolution. Swallowed up by an exercise of power in 1989, I am not the b**tard son, Edmund but Esau. Now I must will for a constitutionally independent Scotland but let it be recognised the English granted the Scottish Parliament without contest, for I stood against. I am as blue as blue can be in Tory Scotland.

If you want guides, buy one. Visit www.trulyspecialrelationship.co.uk for the books I wrote called Intergeneration War 2.0 & Economic Depression Web 2.0. They are smart guides.

In these glorious times of the mob, the new media "proletariat" is both as magnificent & deadly as Marx once prophesized. I stand with this baying mob with (God will forgive) glee. The power I need is total, not for myself but to push the only right path for mankind, nuclear power.

Spat out of the whale, I have my God. I have no wealth, no political power & only light organisation. By contesting dishonour, we are made stronger. Let Goodwin be learned.

Sir Everard Digby

Yet former jailbirds remain free to come and go as they please to the Lords? And expenses thieves who have not yet repaid what they stole are scheduled to return soon -there was even talk of them forfeiting their daily allowance to pay back their 'debt' What?

And those Lords who were alleged to have taken cash for changes to legislation?

If sanctions are to be imposed for utter failure, I suggest a large swathe of the lower house should be sacked immediately.
Followed closely by a significant tranche of those in the upper chamber.

Russell

And look who comes rushing to his defence. Fellow scot Darling who has had a life of luxury care of the taxpayer, fellow scot 'Sir'Jackie Stewart, an overpaid car driver, and a host of labour MP's who were in the corrupt government that awarded this nasty piece of work a knighthood, and worshipped the ground he walked on.
All the pigs at the trough together, thinking themselves entitled to a better life at our expense.
Pity Prescot,Martin,Kinnocks,Archer,Uddin and a lot more can't be treated in the same manner.

john miller

When Cameron said he was the "heir to Blair" he spoke nothing but the plain truth.

The same soul in a different body.

I can see Blair quietly chuckiling at this latest piece of cynical manipuation of people for political ends.

How convenient that Fred has his gong taken away just in time to squeeze another Cameron U-turn out of the headlines.

oldtimer

@ Clear Memories

You are quite right re Mr Robinson. We should remind ourselves that he tried to stop the production of the Metro (funded courtesy of the taxpayer) by barricading the road to the new factory with barbed wire; his dismissal was supported by his TU, the Engineering union, and was applauded (literally) by the workforce at Longbridge when Michael Edwardes walked along the assembly line after his dismissal in order to test the mood of those working there.

The Oncoming Storm

This is a total over reaction, Goodwin may have been hubristic and foolish but he committed no crime. If we're going to take honours away for bad business dealings then surely Sir Victor Blank who was at HBOS should also be defrocked? And what of Lord Simpson, the man who turned solid, cash rich GEC into bankrupt, dot com failure Marconi?

Heartless C.

Tough?! Certainly not!

The ONLY way the 'coalition' can show 'Toughness' is by ditching the pernicious ties to the EUSSR.

dorothy wilson

The editor of the Banker magazine made a salient point on the Jeff Randall programme last night. He pointed out that the then Labour government were very grateful to the City. Apparently Darling said it was like having another North Sea oil.

And, of course, the taxes paid by the City funded Labour's largesse that, now those taxes reduced, we can no longer afford.

Strange though, the blame for the resulting "cuts" seems to be directed at the Conservatives.

Simon Stephenson.

Andy Leeds : 10.39pm

Goodwin was certainly arrogant and full of hubris, but my point is that to have got to the position he did, he had to be. He was/is the product of a society whose desire to widen its distribution led them to re-define what constituted merit; to abandon the standards by which it had been measured for hundreds of years; and to put in place, instead, a process where it was dependent upon the passing whims of mass subjectivity. So "doing things which add to the general good" has been replaced as the benchmark of merit by "doing things which don't offend the intuition of the general public".

Publius

Simon Stephenson writes:
"he was also just the sort of thrusting, tunnel-visioned risk-taker who appealed..." etc.

Quite. And well said. In a word, he was "modern."

And only the other day, on this very site, we were being given more modernising bullshit.

Fergus Pickering

How, may I ask, Russell, is the excellent Jackie Stewart a drain on the public purse? What do you, or did you, do for a living. What was your screw? How did you advance the common good? Were you overpaid? I'm sure you were. How do I know? I just do. Scrounger! Sponger!

Simon Stephenson.

Brian A : 9.18am

Exactly. The British motto - "Never even consider your own inadequacies when you can heap the blame on someone else"

PayDirt

The problem is the title, not so much the banker man, he was just being a banker. It is those who awarded the title who are to blame for this scandel, let them be strung out to dry.

Axstane

The knighthood was for services to banking. Consider that.

I will agree with others who have pointed out that all sorts of scoundrels have Peerages and knighthoods including deliberate fraudsters of whom Lord Taylor of Warwick should have been counted as a minor offender. His crime involved, I think, about £8000. A Labour Baroness took £100,000 and an incredibly wealthy Labour Peer took £41,000 but neither were prosecuted nor were Jacqui Smith or McNulty.

lescam

Simon Stephenson.
January 31st, 2012 9:35pm
Well said.

This is a pure and simple witch hunt, aided and abetted by the lynch mobs of the press. Goodwin is not a criminal or a traitor, did not falsely claim "expenses" like our friends in the Commons, and as far as I know never fiddled his taxes. I agree about his arrogance and hubris, but these are not crimes.

And no I am not a Scot.

anxiouswarrior

its not just him that should be done, its the whole square mile and the banks , the spivs and the rest of the free market fanatics are rotten to the core

MilkSnatcher

Goodwin should have handed back his honour early on, and offered himself up as a scapegoat by which lessons could be learned. He could then emerge some years later as a sage-like figure (look at Nick Leeson) to warn us all of future excesses being perpetrated by the political and regulatory classes.

But he didn't. He let the politicians of Left and Right, the real villains, jump on bandwagons and drive around in them spewing sanctimonious vomit.

Tiberius

Justice on all this will not be done until Brown hands himself in to Scotland Yard, unshaven, tieless, reeking of cheap scotch, and with the fully loaded pistol still in his pocket.

E Hart

It is entirely fitting that Fred Goodwin should have been knighted. The honours system mirrors beautifully the tambre of our society: corrupt, greedy, incompetent, hypocritical, groveling, deferential, sociopathic... and ultimately - frightfully common.

I'm still wondering who thought it was a good idea to reward Nicolae Ceaucescu, Lord Ashton, Robert Mugame...

EC

This whole affair is a piece of misdirection. I doubt very much if Fred could give a FF about his knighthood. If he's got any sense he'll be sitting by a pool somewhere in the Caribbean.

BTW Does anybody here know how Jacqui Smith got away with £115,000 er... as the saying goes Scott Free ?

Tarka the Rotter

"Scapegoat?

He was the CEO of RBS for chrissake. It's his job to carry the can".

And Gordon Brown was PM of the UK for chrissake. It's his job to carry the can. But he won't. Ever.

Corinium

If we're going to de-honour people whose rotten judgement has cost the nation tens of billions of £s then the House of Lords will be empty.

Ken

Now take him to court. The Companies Act has enough about a director's obligations and duties to find material for a charge that will stick. If we are to be rightly tough on bad bankers they need to be prosecuted in the way some are now being in the US. The knighthood nonsense is displacement activity but welcome anyway.

Simon Stephenson.

anxious warrior : 12.28pm

Stalin thought something similar about the kulaks, going so far, in 1930, as to set in motion the Politburo's approval of their extermination. It's not apparent that this policy did anything to help the rest of the Russian population, so perhaps you'ld do well to consider whether the villainizing of the City, in its entirety, will do much to help the people of the UK.

Bob Dixon

Messgage from PM's office. Please give up this share bonus?

Messgage from Stephen Hestor's office.
Can do but you must strip the Sir from Fred.