Britannia Radio

This needed saying -and one of my favourite columnists says it! .    
It is Brown and the politicians who set the rules, appointed the 
regulators but still loused it up.  THEY must carry the can.

Goodwin got it wrong and ruined RBS.  He has gone.  But the 
politicians are still at it making it worse each day and all the 
media - not just the tabloids - can feature is an obscene pension 
which Goodwin arranged for himself .  The "class" papers are 
schizophrenic about it , urging focus on the real issues in one place 
while following  the mass hysteria elsewhere.  And don't forget this 
hysteria is being whipped up more by Gordon Brown himself than by 
anyone else and started with a deliberate 'leak' to a dodgy BBC 
journalist.

Britain will collapse unless we're very lucky.  The situation is 
desperate and being made worse.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX  CS
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TELEGRAPH  1.3.09
Sir Fred Goodwin is stealing the show from the real culprits
The thirst for vengeance is distracting us from a terrible reality - 
that the economy is in a worse state than anyone will admit, writes 
Jeff Randall.

Jeff Randall

It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat
on a pension.    - Louis MacNeice, 'Bagpipe Music'

Well, perhaps not 50 years, but if Sir Fred Goodwin manages to avoid 
the lynch mob, actuaries believe he could be hanging his tam-o'-
shanter on a pension for at least another 40. With a pay-out 
approaching £700,000 per annum, that would drain about £28 million 
from Royal Bank of Scotland's depleted vaults. It's a Myners-boggling 
sum.

I've not heard We're in the Money played on the bagpipes, but given 
that Sir Fred is practically unemployable he will have plenty of time 
to learn it. His remarkable transition from Britain's most successful 
banker to Public Enemy Number 1 is all but complete. Not even Abu 
Qatada at his most unappealing could hope to match the intensity of 
abuse heaped on The Shred.

With so many people facing hardship, as the economy unravels, there 
is a not-unreasonable desire among innocent victims to blame someone. 
Even those who have been the architects of their own misfortune, by 
over-borrowing to fund fantasy lifestyles, prefer to look for a demon 
than in the mirror. And who better to fill that role than the banking 
big-shot who walked away from the wreckage of RBS with a jewel-
encrusted pension?

If the inappropriately named Goodwin did not exist, the Government's 
Department of Propaganda would need to invent him. By casting Sir 
Fred as the pantomime villain - the credit crunch's Dick Dastardly - 
the unholy trinity of Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and Lord 
Mandelson has been able to deflect attention from Labour's calamitous 
stewardship.

The Prime Minister in particular has been brazen in threatening Sir 
Fred with court action to retrieve a pension package that was signed 
off by the City minister, Lord Myners. This is grandstanding of the 
cheapest kind. Sir Fred's deal is obscene, but that does not make it 
illegal. Mr Brown understands this, but is desperate for the 
searchlight of public opprobrium to be shifted away from the 
unfolding debacle in Downing Street. Ironic, isn't it, that having 
destroyed Britain's private pension system with a tax raid which, 
grossed up over 12 years, has snatched about £100 billion from 
personal savings schemes, the Prime Minister is now keen to preach on 
pensions and justice.

Even if Mr Brown were to get his way, and Sir Fred ended up as a 
modern-day William Wallace - emasculated, eviscerated, with his head 
placed on a pike atop London Bridge - Britain's deep-rooted financial 
stress would not be alleviated. Our [NOT MINE! -cs]  thirst for 
vengeance, though understandable, is distracting us from a terrible 
reality: the economy is in worse shape than anyone in power is 
prepared to admit, and public finances are completely out of control.

Until Sir Fred steered RBS into a consortium bid for ABN Amro, I 
regarded him as one of this country's most talented, albeit cold-
blooded, financiers. That acquisition, however, which cost £49 
billion, was so ill-judged, it torpedoed the bank's balance sheet and 
blew up his reputation for leadership. There are few better examples 
of the speed at which nemesis follows hubris.

As a manager, Sir Fred is finished, but as a man he could find some 
redemption by handing over half his pension to a small charity. Such 
a gesture would make a huge difference to a hospice or a children's 
home, and do the rest of us a favour by removing from ministers the 
smokescreen behind which they seek to conceal their own egregious 
shortcomings. Forget Goodwin, it's the bad loss of Government 
financial discipline that should concern us most.

The Chancellor is not an evil man, {OK, Jeff - that's YOUR view -cs]  
but is so far out of his depth that sonar systems can no longer track 
him. Like Mr O'Reilly, the Irish builder in Fawlty Towers, with each 
attempt at fixing the previous botched job, he creates a new, more 
threatening, set of problems. In the end, the roof falls in. Where's 
Mr Stubbs when we need him?

Last week's £325 billion insurance scheme for RBS's toxic assets is 
hopelessly flawed, according to Professor Willem Buiter, a former 
member of the Monetary Policy Committee. He estimates that it will 
cost the taxpayer £100 billion. That is three times the annual 
defence budget

  Let's hope that our children and theirs have a strong work ethic, 
because they will be paying for the profligacy of this Government 
long after it is booted out.

Ministers, meanwhile, should be careful for what they wish. Once we 
set off down the road to annulling pension contracts, who knows where 
the journey will end. Nobody, to my knowledge, is claiming that Sir 
Fred had his hands in the till. His crime, if it can be so described, 
was one of vainglorious incompetence, embroidered with insufficient 
contrition.

Yes, he ran one proud institution into the ground. But no one died. 
If he is to be stripped of his pension, what should happen to those 
of ministers who have driven a whole country into the ditch, while 
sanctioning a futile adventure in Iraq that has cost the lives of at 
least 179 British servicemen?

If Treasury lawyers are going to be examining the legality of Sir 
Fred's bonanza, perhaps they could apply the same level of rigour to 
the retirement entitlements of the entire Cabinet and many who have 
left it, including Tony Blair.

John Prescott is demanding that there should be no reward for 
failure. Quite right, too. So might we, the taxpayers, expect a 
partial refund of his pension pot, worth the equivalent of more than 
£1.5 million? That's a lot of money for a pathetic Lothario whose 
greatest contribution to public life, a proposal for elected 
assemblies in the English regions, was laughed into oblivion.

And what about Mr Brown? Will he merit a £130,000 pension? Having 
appointed himself chief executive of UK plc (the shareholders were 
not consulted), does his record bear scrutiny? Gold reserves sold at 
rock bottom prices. Unemployment higher than when Labour came to 
power - and rising. Bankruptcies soaring, so too home repossessions. 
Border controls abandoned.

Louis MacNeice had something to say about this: "It's no go my honey 
love, it's no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the 
winds will blow the profit."