Having mixed feelings over the Goodwin pension debacle

Gordon Brown is getting all uptight at ex-RBS chief Sir Fred Goodwin’s decision to keep his massive pension, despite the bank’s record losses of umpteen billion.

While Fred is undoubtedly an odious whelk, I can’t help but think that Gordon has got things out of proportion. Sure a £16m pension pot is an outrageous amount, but it’s a drop in the ocean in terms of the banking bailouts and the general economic crisis.

Gordon’s explosion is all a smokescreen. The PM’s ire would be far better turned on himself for permitting characters like Goodwin to prosper with such catastrophic results for the past decade.

Posted via email from Thoughtcat’s Posterous

Filed under: Uncategorized, politics

Gordon ‘gets tough’ with the bankers

The BBC reports Gordon Brown as saying that the culture of rewarding bankers for failure and short term gain is being “swept away”, and that Labour would “aggressively” pursue action to ensure that future rewards for bankers were based on “long-term success” and failure was penalised.

The words horse, bolt, shutting, and door all come to mind. I’m sure the bankers are quaking in their boots.

Backdate the “aggressiveness”, Gordon, if you want to truly atone for your government’s pathetic lack of bank regulation in the past decade.

Posted via email from thoughtcat’s posterous

Filed under: Uncategorized, politics

George Bush – he’s not dead yet, you know

The Guardian Weekend magazine has a questionnaire thing called Q&A; it puts to a different celebrity each week. The questions – some serious, some less so – are always the same, with the exception of the downright cheeky but irresistible ‘How often do you have sex?’, which only sometimes gets answered. (It’s not actually clear whether the interviewees get the choice of answering the question – although of course they can’t exactly be forced to – or the mag only asks it in the first place at its discretion.) Anyway, one of the other questions is ‘Which living person do you most despise?’ Unsurprisingly, most people answer ‘George Bush’, to the point where one reader recently wrote saying the question should be changed to ‘Which living person apart from George Bush do you most despise?’ Last week however, Streets frontman Mike Skinner’s reply was ‘Boris, idiot mayor of London’. Given that Boris Johnson has never, to my knowledge, started a war on a false premise which has seen thousands killed, I thought this a tad harsh, but then that’s the problem – Bush has set the bar so high that to name anyone else (apart perhaps from Tony Blair or the truly disgusting Robert Mugabe, who gets off lightly) just seems ridiculous. This week a reader comments on Skinner’s choice, saying that since Bush’s ‘demise’ last month the respondents to Q&A; are clearly finding they’re having to use their imaginations a bit more. But this reader (not to mention the Weekend letters editor) seems a tad confused, since last I heard, being voted out of office does not rule you out of being a living person, so I feel we can expect George to turn up in Q&A; for some time to come. Then again, Bush never really counted as a fully-alive human being for the whole of his presidency, so maybe not… although of course that would disqualify him from being named by all those Q&A; respondents over the past eight years, so we can’t have that. Anyway, I’ve written to the Guardian Weekend magazine to make my feelings clear.

Posted via email from thoughtcat’s posterous

Filed under: Uncategorized, Bush, grauniad, politics

David Cameron on ‘responsible capitalism’

Tory leader David Cameron says the bankers who have got us into the present financial mess “now need to use [their] talents to help the poorest build assets”. I’m not sure whether to be terrified at the prospect of “the poor” being turned, Cybermen-like, into a new army of reckless bankers, or to grin at the thought of disgraced financial “stars” being forced into a new kind of community service…

Posted via email from thoughtcat’s posterous

Filed under: Uncategorized, doctor who, politics

Riddley would be proud

“John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, has spent £645 updating the sign on the front of his office,” reports today’s Times. “To ensure that visitors don’t get confused, the old sign, ‘Office of the Deputy Prime Mininster’, has been replaced by one saying ‘Deputy Prime Minister’s Office’.” While I sympathise with the Times’s outrage at this waste of money (and that’s just Prescott’s lunch), its spelling of “minister” doesn’t help its case – why, it’s almost verging on the reasonable to correct a typo in a sign on the door of an MP, no matter how dubious his claim to office may be. More layers of irony suggest themselves, indeed, as it becomes clear that this typo couldn’t have been associated with a more appropriate “mincer” of the language, as my old friend Riddley Walker – whose literacy skills incidentally trounce Prescott’s – would no doubt have described him.

Filed under: Uncategorized, politics, Russell Hoban, tossers

Profumo

I was surprised to see the death reported of Lord Profumo – I thought he’d died years ago. The reports all say the same thing, that whatever he’d achieved as an MP would be overshadowed by the “infamous sex scandal”. This is doubly sad, since not only did he seem on balance a decent bloke but the scandal purported not to be about the sex but about the fact that he’d lied to Parliament about the affair with Christine Keeler. This is bullshit, of course – politicians lie all the time and get away with it. What isn’t tolerated in the UK is politicians having sex. Frankly if more ministers for war (of which there are many, even if the post has now gone) spent their time screwing and less time making war the world would be a far nicer place.

Filed under: Uncategorized, all you need is love, politics

Three cheers for Walter Wolfgang

I am very proud to say that Walter Wolfgang, the 82-year-old anti-war activist who was manhandled out of the Labour Party conference this week for shouting the word “nonsense” during a Jack Straw speech about Iraq, lives in my neighbourhood. I sometimes see him shopping in my local Waitrose (a home from home, but that’s another story). He actually used to be a much closer neighbour of mine when I lived in a different part of the town years ago but at that time I didn’t know anything about him. Now the whole world knows about Mr Wolfgang (or “Walter” as Tony Blair called him rather patronisingly in his “apology” for the delegate’s treatment).

The first time I got to know about WW was during the war in Kosovo when I attended a local political meeting. (That invasion seemed pretty dire at the time, although compared to Iraq it now seems a model of legitimacy.) It was a slightly weird occasion – in fact so much so that this was not only the first but the last political meeting I’ve ever been to – where the war wasn’t really discussed but railed against by a bunch of lefty oddballs whose views ranged from moderately critical to downright bonkers. As chair of the “debate”, WW was one of the few calm voices in the room. I have to admit that when I first saw the footage of WW being bundled out of the conference on Wednesday’s Channel 4 News, my gut reaction was that the poor old sod had finally lost it, but I was delighted to see that this was a million miles from the truth.

Yesterday’s Independent lost no time in citing Mr Wolfgang’s treatment as the perfect example of everything that is sick at the heart of the government. As if that front page splash with a photo of WW being led away by police wasn’t enough, today’s front page features a whole article by the man himself about the incident and why he was protesting. It’s excellent: “My case is not important” is the self-effacing opening sentence, while later he describes Blair as “the worst leader the Labour Party has ever had” and observes: “Blair’s instincts are basically those of a Tory. He picked up this cause from the Americans without even analysing it. I suspect that he is too theatrical even to realise that he is lying.” That’s a great line and I think the best and most succinct explanation I’ve yet heard for why Blair has acted (pun intended) the way he has.

So, good on you, Mr Wolfgang. If I ran a restaurant I’d invite you in for a meal on the house but as it is I’ll probably have to make do with shaking your hand the next time I see you in Waitrose.

Filed under: Uncategorized, iraq, politics, tossers, war on terror