Fred the Shred

[Nick]

Leg Iron is on form

http://leg-iron.livejournal.com/

[Barman]

Leg Iron is on form

http://leg-iron.livejournal.com/

Indeed... worth printing it here too...

Everything the Righteous try to achieve backfires on them. Every single thing. You'd think they'd notice by now, but no, they carry on making snap decisions involving every bodily organ except the brain. The Righteous, as a whole, backfire more often than a Ford Anglia running on paraffin.

News is everywhere today of the Ginger Midget's attempts to bypass the law and whisk away a duff banker's pension. Well, he shouldn't get that much money for crashing a bank. I'd have crashed it for half the money. He does, however, have a contract signed by Monsters of Government which says he can have that pension and he's saying 'Get stuffed'. It might not be morally his but it certainly is legally his.

Can't say I blame him, and can't say I'm all that bothered. Once the Gorgon lets loose the printing presses, that pension won't be worth much anyway.

Hideous Harman, however, has no idea how big a can of worms she is opening. She is proposing to make the pension illegal retrospectively, and effectively pass legislation aimed at criminalising an individual whose contract was signed by Government monsters.

I have no money to speak of, but if I did I'd be moving it out of  the country right now, and moving my business and myself shortly afterwards. Whether Hideous goes ahead with this or not, it's clear to anyone with a big income that Labour intends to try to steal it from them. Whether Fred Goodwin gets robbed or not, it's clear that this Government has the intention of trying it. This is no longer a good place to be rich, hasn't been for some time but it just became very dodgy indeed.

So the rich capitalists all leave. Hooray, say the idiot socialists. Then they wonder why their tax take is down. All they have left are the likes of me and I earn far less than those rich guys pay in tax. I'll be earning even less once they've gone because it's their companies I do contract work for.

So, no millions in tax from the rich guys, reduced or zero tax from those (like me) who worked for the rich guys, zero tax from those I subcontract to, zero tax from rich guy's company's ex-employees. Benefits for everyone... except there's now no tax income to pay them. Whoops. Backfire.

That's not all. Dan Hannan has a word for this idea of making up laws on the fly and applying them retrospectively. He calls it a Bill of Attainder and it was last done in this country in 1798. Ah, the good old days when government could make up laws as they saw fit and apply them to just one person.

Only this time it won't. It sets a precedent. Anyone judged to have a bit too much of a pension can have it stolen from them. It could backfire on Hideous and the Gorgon, should the Tories decide to have a bit of fun with their new laws next year. More likely it will backfire on anyone with a pension fund. Not the filthy rich, they'll be moving their pension pots and savings overseas as I type. No, it'll be the ordinary saver who gets it, next time the Gorgon fancies a bit of a spree and finds the piggy bank empty.

There is a deeper issue here. Never mind the money. This is making up laws and applying them to the past. Consider:

Smokers have to shiver outside pubs to smoke. It's legal to smoke outside (unless you're in the grounds of the NHS or some other cretinous organisation who thinks that diesel fumes are too good to be polluted with tobacco). The Gorgon finds his piggy bank empty and thinks 'If I fine those smokers for smoking outside, nobody will mind because we've conditioned them not to.' Ah, but he knows that if he does this, the smokers will stay home and smoke. 'Aha!' thinks the Gorgon. 'I'll Goodwin them. Tomorrow I'll pass a law to make it illegal to smoke outside, backdate it a month and get some of those spare civil servants to trawl through CCTV. The police can go out and collect the revenue. Sorted.'

There is no escape from this kind of lawmaking. Something you do legally today can be declared illegal tomorrow. That happens all the time anyway. What if it was retrospective? What if what you're doing legally today becomes illegal tomorrow and you can then be fined for doing it yesterday? There are blogs with photos of policemen. It's now illegal to photograph policemen. What if the Gorgon decides to make that retrospective, so that owning or displaying a photo of a policeman becomes illegal?

If he does this to Fred Goodwin, he'll have no qualms about doing it to us.

This is more than a rich blunderer getting a pension he doesn't deserve. This is the collapse of the whole basis of law. This is the Gorgon deciding, day by day, what he feels like making legal and illegal and what he feels like fining us for.

Police state? We just moved beyond that.

 

[Grumpmeister]

The Daily Mash:-

BROWN REFUSES TO HAND BACK PENSION

GORDON Brown last night dismissed calls to surrender his £123,000 a year pension when he is forced to stop being prime minister next June.

Mr Brown was defiant in the face of City outrage despite the UK government's annual operating loss of £100bn, rising to £1.5 trillion when the write-down of its banking assets is taken into account.

The prime minister said: "I've been building up this pension since I became an MP, it's all completely legal and now you want to take it away because I've been catastrophically bad at my job and you're looking for a scapegoat. What gives?"

He added: "Yes I've been in charge of financial regulation for 12 years, yes I encouraged the housing bubble, and yes I pissed billions up the wall giving pointless jobs to Labour voters, but I fail to see what any of this has to do with me being incredibly well off."

Brown's £3m pension pot is expected to cast the spotlight on the extravagant retirement packages of other failed politicians including Alistair Darling's inexplicable £1.7m and the £1.5m awarded to John Prescott for being a national scandal for 10 years.

Meanwhile Margaret Beckett has a fund worth £1.7m, something called 'Hilary Armstrong' has £1.2m and Tessa Jowell has £1m even though no-one has the faintest idea what any of them actually did.

Critics insist Mr Brown has a moral duty to hand back his pension fund as he will inevitably receive a multi-million pound advance for two volumes of eye-gougingly tedious memoirs which will end up in the bargain bucket at WH Smith within a fortnight.

Martin Bishop, head of pension rows at the Institute for Studies, said: "It's a fascinating dynamic. The politicians blame the bankers, the bankers blame the politicians, and the ordinary taxpayer is down on all fours with a confused look on his face, being f@cked at both ends."

To be fair if it stopped him from cocking up this country or the global economy any further £123,000  would be a small price to pay. 

Back on topic with Sir Fred, given that he was awarded his knighthood for 'services to banking' I give it at most a couple of months before some bright spark realises that stripping him of his knighthood would be a good image booster.

[Snoopy]

A letter published in The Times last week:

Question:
Who is the odd man out?
Lord Stevenson, former chairman HBOS;
Andy Hornby, former chief executive HBOS;
Sir Fred Goodwin, former chief executive Royal Bank of Scotland;
John McFall MP, chairman of the Treasury select commitee;
Alistair Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer;
Sir Terry Wogan, presenter of Radio 2's breakfast show.



Answer:
Sir Terry Wogan.

He is the ONLY one with a banking qualification.


He is too as he qualifed by passing his banking examinations when he worked in an Irish bank before becoming a radio "jock"

[Snoopy]

And the more we learn the worse it gets

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article5864482.ece

From The Sunday TimesMarch 8, 2009

Sir Fred Goodwin let slip Dutch art fortune

ROYAL Bank of Scotland (RBS) has surrendered its interest in one of Europe’s biggest private art collections without getting a penny for the taxpayer.

When Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of RBS, went on a buying spree of the world’s banks, his spoils included an interest in a famous art collection assembled by ABN Amro, the Dutch bank, which is worth tens of millions of pounds.

The artworks might have offered some consolation after Goodwin’s disastrous £61 billion takeover of ABN Amro in 2007. The collection has 16,000 pieces ranging from sculptures by Donald Judd to works by Marlene Dumas, the South African artist, one of whose paintings sold for £3.18m at Sotheby’s in London last year.

However, it has emerged that RBS’s acquisition of the ABN Amro collection was another of Goodwin’s dismal deals, because they were deftly hived off from ABN Amro before the takeover.

It meant RBS had day-to-day use of the collection but was not the legal owner and could never sell the works. RBS confirmed last week they were not included in the bank’s assets during the sale.

Instead, under legal terms drawn up by ABN Amro, Goodwin’s bank was lumbered with a chunk of the maintenance costs and staff bills.

In its drive to cut costs, RBS has passed its rights in the collection to the Dutch retail business of ABN Amro, now owned by the Dutch government. No money has changed hands.

The transfer will be seen as a minor coup for Rijkman Groenink, the canny former chief executive of ABN Amro.

While Groenink realised the RBS takeover was inevitable, he acted to prevent one of the oldest and best-known corporate art collections from falling into foreign hands.

In the weeks before the RBS deal went through, he transferred the artworks and legal ownership into a foundation that he headed.

Some artworks adorn the walls of the bank’s offices throughout the Netherlands, while others are kept in vaults in the Dutch town of Weesp.

The ABN Amro takeover was largely responsible for the near-collapse of RBS, which forced a bailout from public funds.

Last month the bank announced a £24.1 billion loss in 2008, the largest in British corporate history. The bulk of the loss was attributable to the ABN Amro deal.

An RBS spokeswoman said last week that the bank relinquished its interest in the ABN Amro collection after Goodwin’s departure.

She said RBS’s decision “was deemed the optimal outcome . . . given the costs and very complex ownership structure which the art foundation had in place”.

RBS still owns the NatWest art collection, which it acquired along with the bank in 2000. That collection, which includes works by Lowry and Damien Hirst, was once on public display in the City of London but is now confined to banking boardrooms and offices.