I think I may be swimming against the tide here, but I am not at all happy about the government's media campaign against Sir Fred Goodwin.
Okay, I think top executives of big businesses are ridiculously overpaid, but you don't fix that by picking on one and having a media campaign of vilification. It all seems a bit maoist, with the denunciations.
"Sir Fred Goodwin should not count on being £650,000 a year better off because it is not going to happen," Harriet Harman told the BBC's Andrew Marr programme.
Doesn't that have a certain air of "we know where you live" menace? We're going to take the money off him, we just haven't figured out how to make it legal yet.
I don't particularly like the fact that these executives overpay themselves, but I (about a hundred times as much) don't want to live in a country where the government can just step in and find a way to confiscate money from anyone it doesn't like, because quote "The sum is unacceptable in "the court of public opinion," she told the BBC". I.e. We've worked up a lynch mob, so now we can do whatever we like?
In another era, it might have been "it's unacceptable in the court of public opinion" for a black man to earn that much, or a woman. We're fetching a rope.
Okay. A few points here.
1. Not everything that's immoral should be illegal.
2. If something IS illegal, you do it through the courts, not by ministerial announcements on the BBC.
3. If it's not illegal, then you don't mount vilification campaigns against one individual. The government should never "step in" directly against people it doesn't like.
4. Especially when it seems to be to cover up their own mistakes! (I.e. they approved it, without looking into it).
5. We keep being told by the media drones that Fred "presided over" the biggest loss in British corporate history. Scuse me, but I distinctly remember listening to radio 4 and hearing Gordon Brown say not once but 4 times that the causes of the banking crisis here were nothing to do with anyone in this country, but originated in the USA. So what are we punishing sir Fred for? For being in office when it happened? If so, does that principle apply to Gordon too?
To me it illustrates the huge, huge dangers of nationalised industries. Your employer is the government. The two bodies that have the most power over you (the state, and your employer) are the same. And the roles get blurred. The government should make the laws that control employers . . . so it should never be one.
I'd have been pleased if Sir Fred had voluntarily given some of it back. Since he hasn't, I would really not like to discover that I live in a country where the government can just seize his assets for being too much (they have not even attempted to argue that he actually did anything wrong).
