Sir Fred Goodwin

[Al12]

No way should he get £650,000 for losing £24 billion and if he does then he should be made to give it back.


http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Unworthy-Knight/

[mispy]

You may view this as splitting hairs, but he's getting £693k/year for having attained the position of chairman, rather than for having presided over insanely large losses. Surely anger should be directed at the fact that anyone considered this pension appropriate, whether or not the bank did well under his leadership. It may still be unacceptable, but your phrasing makes this much more a personal attack than a criticism of the excesses of the banking world in the recent past. Presumably this sort of figure was agreed a long time ago, was not then considered egregious, and would never have been reported had the economy not started to suffer.

[Lid]

I don't think his entire pension comes from RBS either. I think I read that he brought a lot of pension entitlements over to his RBS scheme when he became CEO, so the entire pot wasn't RBS's. I'd be intrigued to know how much was purely RBS cash in the first place.

My personal opinion on the matter is 'well done'. If you can get away with it, do it. That's business.

[David Bean]

Surely the real scandal was the government stooge Robert Peston breaking this story on his masters' behalf, cynically timed to distract attention from the billions upon billions of pounds of our money being extended to the Royal Bank to bail out its irresponsible debts, with no plan in sight for getting our money back? £16 million is nothing, but it's a damn sight easier to rattle red sabres over that than explain to the people why our future is being comprehensively squandered at the behest of the worst, most dangerous Prime Minister in British history, while the BBC colludes in burying the story in drivel like this.

[Icarus]

Surely the real scandal was the government stooge Robert Peston breaking this story on his masters' behalf, cynically timed to distract attention from the billions upon billions of pounds of our money being extended to the Royal Bank to bail out its irresponsible debts, with no plan in sight for getting our money back? £16 million is nothing, but it's a damn sight easier to rattle red sabres over that than explain to the people why our future is being comprehensively squandered at the behest of the worst, most dangerous Prime Minister in British history, while the BBC colludes in burying the story in drivel like this.

Conspiracy theory, much?

[David Bean]

It's not a conspiracy theory; all you have to do is switch on BBC News, and it's right there in front of you!

[Guest]

Surely the real scandal was the government stooge Robert Peston breaking this story on his masters' behalf, cynically timed to distract attention from the billions upon billions of pounds of our money being extended to the Royal Bank to bail out its irresponsible debts, with no plan in sight for getting our money back? £16 million is nothing, but it's a damn sight easier to rattle red sabres over that than explain to the people why our future is being comprehensively squandered at the behest of the worst, most dangerous Prime Minister in British history, while the BBC colludes in burying the story in drivel like this.

Conspiracy theory, much?

Seems very logical to me.

I admire the government for how they have the time to legislate specifically to remove one man's pension. I assume all their other legislation this year will be absolutely flawless if they have that amount of time available. I also thought when Harriet Harman said "it maybe legal in a court of law but it is not legal in the court of public opinion" how wonderful it is to have a government that has so much respect for the law and that it wasn't at all a bad precedent to set. Get these clowns out.

[David Bean]

No kidding! Harperson really outdid herself on this one. Here's Andrew Lilico's take:

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/centr ... th-or.html

Yet curiously, as the article also notes, even Brown realises she went too far this time:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009 ... in-pension