I write this having just returned from the BBC, where I spent a hairy six-and-a-half minutes sticking up for Fred the Shred on Newsnight. Or, rather, attacking the Forfeiture Committee’s decision to strip him of his knighthood. My antagonist was Will Hutton, former editor of the Observer and currently the Principal of Hertford College, Oxford. Referee: Jeremy Paxman.
Hutton’s view, like Ed Miliband’s, is that this is a victory for ‘moral capitalism’. What that boils down to, as far as I can tell, is bankers forgoing their bonuses and, in some cases, being stripped of their honours. To me, it feels more like political opportunism. Not a decision based on a dispassionate analysis of the role Fred Goodwin played in the collapse of RBS, but a cack-handed attempt by Downing Street to defuse some of the public’s anger about bankers by tossing them a sacrificial lamb.
I say ‘cack-handed’ because punishing people like Goodwin plays into the hands of those trying to pin the blame for our current economic woes on capitalist fat cats rather than spendthrift politicians.
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