The thirty-sixth weekly "No shit, Sherlock" award and more

A bit soon after the thirty-fifth but it's a good one.

Ian King in The Times:

"Politicians are to blame for whipping up public hatred

So, John Prescott, Gordon Brown, Harriet Harman and others, I hope you are proud of yourselves. Even as the Prime Minister was lecturing Wall Street on morality, the clean-up was beginning at the home of Sir Fred Goodwin, where windows had been smashed by vandals.

Well done, everyone. Well done on whipping up public hatred. Well done on ensuring that his children have been picked on at school. On ensuring that the man’s life is now so miserable that he may have to go and live overseas. You may not have lobbed a brick through Sir Fred’s plate-glass window yourselves but, in inciting public anger over his pension, you might as well have done. "

"No shit, Sherlock"

Of course the real truth is that attacks on Fred Goodwin and the threats against the City and its workers for 1 April are exactly what the Labour cabal want and need. The more blame they can lay on the bankers and the more hatred they can whip up against the bankers, the more attention is diverted from their rank incompetence, brazen lies and total mismanagement of the Country. And of course if the April protests turn into riots or worse then Gordon Brown, Jack Straw and Jacqui Smith have the Civil Contingencies Act ready and waiting to implement and turn the most hated government for many a year into a permanent government.

Do I sound scared? You bet I am.

The result of incitement?

The BBC report that:

"The Edinburgh home of former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Sir Fred Goodwin has been attacked by vandals overnight.

Windows were smashed and a Mercedes S600 car parked in the driveway was vandalised. "

The BBC then issue a partial explanation:

"There has been widespread public and political anger over a pension payout worth about £700,000 a year to the 50-year-old former chief executive."

So far as I am concerned, the BBC's taking of the Labour party line that it is all the fault of the bankers and not the government has contributed to this attack.

Fred Goodwin, Lord Myners and large pensions

Guido Fawkes has the story and will be worth watching today as this one evolves.

If this story is true can Lord Myners do anything other than resign? Although NewLabour Britain means Ministers never having to resign or say sorry.

Democracy? Respect for law? (update)

Yesterday I blogged thus:

"The prime minister has said that it is not acceptable and therefore it will not be accepted... And it might be enforceable in a court of law, this contract, but it is not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that is where the government steps in."

That's Harriet Harman as reported by the BBC.

If that quotation doesn't scare you, then it bloody well should.

What Harriet Harman seems to be saying is:
1) that if Gordon Brown says something isn't acceptable then it will not be accepted. Is the UK a one-man dictatorship now?
2) that regardless of the law the government can step in.

Do you find that acceptable?


Today I see that others have picked up on this staggering threat issued by Harriet Harman. Libertarian Alliance have an open letter to Fred Goodwin that includes this:

"Are laws to be changed by merely what the sitting government says is “public opinion”? What, then, is Parliament for? A very dangerous precedent for the prospects for individual liberty - and in particular property rights - would be set by Harbint’s words, if she were able to translate them into actions."

The Times have straight report that sheds little light onto the matter of Harriet Harman's extraordinary threats to ignore thye law of the land.

It is Jeff Randall in The Telegraph that gets the fact that this is a diversion, a deliberate obfuscation of the true problem:

"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 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."

The Labour spin machine has got their teeth into this one and they have generally succeeded in getting the press and the oh so compliant BBC to toe the "party line". Therefore it is the duty of all free-thinkers to expose the deliberate misdirection.

The consequences of making ‘reckless decisions’`

Martin Day a correspondent on Iain Dale's blog has made a rather interesting suggestion, which I reproduce below.

"The recession gives the public a chance to get some tax payer's money back if you follow my logic!

Gordon Brown has presided over Labour’s economic strategy for a decade and a half. The Labour party wilfully followed and implemented Gordon Brown’s Economic Plan.

We now see Gordon Brown and Labour trying to gain political capital through stripping Fred Goodwin of his Pension. Whilst in my opinion the Goodwin Pension should be partially stripped back to the time when he (Goodwin) made reckless decisions as CEO of RBS, supported by a compliant board of directors (I hope they are not ‘due’ bumper Pensions as well). I do think this opens up an interesting Political point!

If Brown is advocating a removal of Fred Goodwin’s pension for taking ‘reckless decisions’ and forcing the banking group into failure and the tax payer picking up the tab. Why does Brown not have his Pension removed for doing a ‘Fred Goodwin’ on the whole economy? It was Brown’s mismanagement of the economy, its regulatory structure and arrogantly implementing policy changes that has caused hardship and savage economic contraction.

Maybe Gordon Brown should have his Pension ‘Shredded’ as he seems to have equalled Fred in his Financial Management skills."

If as many of us bloggers as possible push this idea maybe we can create some momentum behind this and get it into the MSM - and then ... who knows?

"Is BBC reporter Robert Peston a government stooge?"

So asks a "Daily Mail Reporter", apparently:

"Fresh questions have been raised over whether BBC Business editor Robert Peston is being used as a Government stooge during the financial crisis.

On Wednesday's 10 O'Clock News, Mr Peston breathlessly reported that Sir Fred Goodwin was already drawing a pension of £650,000-a-year.

He said that his pension post was worth a 'handsome' £16million. It was revealed yesterday that Sir Fred can actually claim an annual pension of £693,000.

The announcement completely overshadowed yesterday's disclosure that RBS had made a record £24billion loss - the biggest-ever in UK corporate history - and that the taxpayer would be insuring the bank against future losses of £325billion."

What a vile, baseless accusation to make against a fine independent journalist.

The Mail's article continues:

"The timing of the story has once again sparked suspicions that the journalist is being used by the government to play down its own part in the current mess.

Rather than focus on the fact that the public were being asked to insure RBS against losses, the story of Goodwin diverted attention."

What nasty suspicious minds some people have...

Is anyone uncomfortable with the imposition of the "2 minute hate" this week?

"It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate....

The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one's teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one's neck. The Hate had started.

As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once, long ago (how long ago nobody quite remembered), had been one of the leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with BIG BROTHER himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had been condemned to death and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared."

Any parallels with the treatment of Fred Goodwin by a Labour Government desperate to keep public attention on an £8 million pension rather than the £300 billion+ "investment".

The difference between banking and investment management with reference to Fred Goodwin and James Crosby

Alex Masterley has a great post on this subject, do go and read it. Here's an extract:

"Goodwin shares with James Crosby the distinction that both rose to the top of a large bank with very little experience of banking. And quite frankly it shows. Crosby came from investment management and operations whilst Goodwin came from accountancy and the BCCI workout, through Clydesdale banks operations. It may not be blindingly obvious bu the skills required for investment management and accounting are very different from those required for banking.

...

banking is very different from investment management. Investment managers hope that the very high returns from some of their positions will offset any of their losing positions. Bankers don’t have that luxury. There is very little upside in banking but a lot of downside. For every loan that goes unrepaid the bank needs the profit from 100 more to recover the loss. The decisions have to be very careful. The accountant can look at a company’s accounts and decide that a loan is likely to be repaid, but that view is a taken on the date the accounts are drawn up. If it goes bad ten days later based on some unexpected incident the auditor shrugs his shoulders. It wasn’t his job to consider. The banker on the other hand has to take a forward view and understand what lies behind the assets he holds, understanding the real probability of not being repaid and whether the earnings he makes from that asset justifies the risk."

Who knew what?

The BBC and Robert Peston are frantically trying to spin that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling knew nothing about Sir Fred Goodwin's special pension arrangements. Now I don't know whether or not they did know, although I have my suspicions. However more to the point, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling are paid a large amount of money, given lavish accommodation and a multitude of perks - not to mention a huge final salary pension - surely we should be able to expect them to know what is actually going on in the affairs of businesses they decide to take under full or partial state control. Instead it is claimed that they knew nothing of the impending financial crisis despite them being in charge of one of the three arms of the tripartite financial regulatory system. It is also claimed that they didn't know what RBS was planning to pay out by way of pensions and bonuses even after taking it over in our name. If Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and the team of Treasury hot-shots, not to mention Shriti Vadera didn't feel able to check senior management's employment contracts to see what benefits were compulsory and what were discretionary, could they not have found an employment lawyer to check the details before they went ahead with the takeover?

The smokescreen of Sir Fred Goodwin's pension arrangements is being used to obscure the real story which is the accusations made by Lord King and Lord Turner to the Treasury Select Committee. The BBC in general and Robert Peston in particular are doing their best to "run interference" for Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling; how can we stop them?