Today, we had a sneaky view inside the New Labour snake pit.Yesterday, Deputy PM Harriet Harman promised to snatch back Goodwin's pension by any means necessary.
However, her colleagues, if that is the right word, cut her loose. Brown promised that the government would use every "legal" avenue to retrieve the payout. There would be no retrospective change in the law requiring Goodwin to surrender his ill-gotten gains. Likewise, Jacqui Smith ruled out any attempt to usurp 800 years of legal precedent in order to squeeze the former head of RBS.
Is this good or bad news? Goodwin still has his pension, Brown is still posturing, and Harman has been slapped down. It is hard to say, really.
3 comments:
Good news.
If I had it I'd gladly pay 700k a year to slap Harman.
Good news.
Regardless of how wrong the Shred's pension is, turning contract law into swiss cheese and the ensuing years of court cases would do far more damage to the UK.
After all, who'd want to set up shop in a nation where contracts could be annulled at a whim? And there'd be a highly expensive trip through several layers of courts costing the taxpayer millions, for a case that would likely find in favour of Goodwin at the end.
Sack Myners, find a few scapegoats to sacrifice to public opinion, grumble a bit and move on is the only sensible thing to do.
And if Brown has any brains left, he needs to reshuffle Harman into something disaster-prone or unpopular to negate the political capital she's made out of this.
Harriet gets ridiculed
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