I’m not quite old enough to remember the McCarthy era but reading the history, it strikes me as an intense period of collective government sponsored insanity. Such is the way I read the uproar over Sir Fred Goodwin’s £693,00 pa pension.
It really doesn’t matter who is/was right/wrong in signing off on the deal that guarantees such a large pension but if Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman think that the court of public opinion give them the right to spout off such dangerous utterances as:
“Sir Fred should not be counting on being £650,000 a year better off as a result of this because it is not going to happen,”
…with any expectation of credibility then we’re one short step away from public flogging and kangaroo courts. That’s before we get to considering whether government has a legal right to force the issue or the hypocrisy of such statements.
The UK government has followed a deliberate policy of allowing the UK banking sector to get away with virtually no oversight so it should not be surprising when unfettered greed runs out of control. Do they honestly think the British public are so stupid as to be wholly unaware of just how much they’ve been responsible for hobbling regulators? Now we have the backlash and as with all backlashes, the rhetoric is frightening.
I’ll be far more impressed with a program of regulation that moves the debate forward rather than concentrating on past problems.
While the McCarthy period was one of anti-communist sentiment, the same sense of madness in public posturing is apparent as the extent of excess emerges from the financial sector bailout.
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