Richard Baum

I noticed tonight that a Facebook group has been launched which campaigns to “Shred John Prescott’s Pension” so as not to “reward him for failure,” in much the same way as he’s campaigning against Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension.

There’s nothing more certain to attract the most feverish bandwagon-jumpers these days than a Facebook group, but this one I think misses the point and misdirects the argument in an unfortunate way.

Putting Mr Prescott aside (for the moment), there are obvious flaws in Sir Fred’s pension payments, and people are right to be annoyed. He seems to have had his annual pension boosted purely as a result of his decision to effectively take the last lifeboat of a sinking ship. Any payments accrued because of this shouldn’t have happened, and there’s an argument to be made to take them away. If there’s a legal avenue to do so, we should go down it.

But some of the punishments suggested for Sir Fred, in my opinion, go too far. They verge on rich-bashing for the sake of it whilst simultaneously missing the real injustice.

For one thing, I am uncomfortable with the idea of passing retrospective laws to take back the man’s pension. Fair enough he has acquired a proportion of it when the company he was running was disappearing down the tubes. But unless his conduct or the conduct of the pension trustees was illegal, in my view we’re stuck with this, even though it’s unpalatable. I cannot understand how liberals can support retrospective legislation such as that suggested. And I cannot understand how a government can hope to foster a respect for the rule of law when it changes that law retrospectively to punish someone disliked by the press. It smacks of legislation framed out of revenge, not reason.

We should tighten the loopholes for the future, sure. But making someone punishable in law for acts which were legal when committed should only happen in the gravest of circumstances (like after a war), if at all. And I don’t think this fits the bill.

A better legacy following this debacle is to make damn sure that this type of irresponsible banking can never happen again.

Sir Fred is not a man who walked in off the street to head up RBS. He worked at the top of banks generating billions for the country for years, and he accrued a lot of money doing it, rightly in my view. His organisation employed tens of thousands directly, and financed companies employing millions more. I know he screwed up something chronic, and we’re all paying for it now (including him, as a taxpayer), but I have a mortgage because banks leant me money, and I have a car for the same reason. And so do millions of others. And yes, the rules were too lax, and he made some awful decisions. But he alone wasn’t to blame. A problem this complex doesn’t have a solution that can fit as a banner headline on page 1 of the Daily Mail.

Sir Fred is a multi-millionaire, and this alone seems enough to outrage large sections of the community. I have heard many people say “It’s outrageous that a man can earn £650,000 per year,” and then just stop there. In my view, it’s not outrageous at all. I don’t care that the man’s loaded. Fair play to him and to everyone else who’s had the brains, gumption and luck to get to live the high life. I hope it happens to me and to all of you. And I hope you live in a retirement so comfortable that you never worry about a thing.

Yes, he earns a fortune, but he pays more in tax than most of the people on my street put together, but if his house is burning down the fire brigade don’t come ten times quicker to help him. I know that’s not a fashionable view to take, but there we are, that’s what I think.

The real outrage is that there are still millions of people in this country who will never earn £650,000 a year for a myriad reasons we should be directing our anger at instead of this one man. Millions of kids so deprived of love, support, not to mention aspiration, that they will never in a million years get the chance to sit in the boardroom of a bank except to clean it. Where’s the outrage at this on the front of the papers or on Facebook?

Where’s the outrage that OAPs reliant on the state pension have seen fixed costs sky-rocket in the last 12 years as Council Tax has doubled and fuel bills have gone up even further?

It’s all disappeared in a tirade of abuse aimed at this one man and his cronies. I don’t think it’s their fault, nor will taking Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension off him solve it. It’s odd that those at the forefront of the anti-Goodwin campaign are perhaps responsible more than any others for these wider, sadder injustices. Recessions will pass, but pensioners will die cold, and the kids born on the local Council estate will die younger and poorer than the kids born on my street.

Harriet Harman, Gordon Brown, Hazel Blears et al have had as many years and more in a position to influence things than Sir Fred. They should think a bit more widely about how to frame their criticisms. We could reduce Sir Fred’s pension to nothing tomorrow, and the money we’d save the taxpayer is nothing compared to the money I think we waste on schemes hatched by the Labour government. In this instance, their anti-Goodwin populism is hypocritical because it misdirects its anger.

But even though he’s been at the wheel of a car hurtling Britain towards meltdown, we still shouldn’t shred John Prescott’s pension, or Blears’ pension or Harman’s, like some want. Firstly, he had a job like everyone else does, and though we might think he did it badly, no court has said he’s done anything criminal and so he shouldn’t have his pension touched. He’s accrued it legally, over many years, and it’s his.

It seems like because he’s an MP, with a pension put funded by me and you, this should make it all the more vulnerable. But it shouldn’t. A pension pot is sacred money put aside for when someone can’t earn anything to support themselves, and although some people get more of it than others, as I said before we should be raising the bottom ones up not pushing the top ones down. Altering the principle on a whim sets a dangerous precedent at the behest of tabloid headlines. And how can anyone be confident in their pension if this kind of thing not only happens but is actively sanctioned by the government?

Yes, I know that some pension funds have disappeared completely, and others have been changed to the detriment of the beneficiaries. This needs to be stopped too. But the way to do it is through positive laws and tighter regulations so that people who screw up and impoverish thousands are punished in the courts and not just in their wallets on a whim by whichever newspaper screams loudest.

Again, this Prescott group on Facebook seems to be an attack on the rich and successful for the sake of it. I think we can do better with our arguments. We might not like Mr Prescott’s politics, and we might have an unfavourable view of him as a man because we’ve read stuff in the papers. But his job is subject to the most clear cut form of performance related pay of any job – UK elections. And he’s managed to win ten of them and stay an MP for nearly 40 years. Possibly because he’s campaigned for, and achieved, significant steps against poverty like the minimum wage. Just the type of thing which would actually help people far more than getting rid of rich people’s pensions.

Anyone with the brains to become Deputy Prime Minister and represent hundreds of thousands of people for decades as an MP could probably have earned significantly more by not serving the public as an MP and by being an accountant or a corporate lawyer (or a banker) instead. If we want the best to lead us in public service, we shouldn’t ask them to pay back money when the decisions they make with good intentions go wrong. We should vote them out and vote in people who’ll make it better and stop it happening again. How can we get good people to stand for anything if their every act risks personal financial ruin? That’s what the Facebookers seem to want.

The only good thing about the Facebook group is that it might give a subtle hint to Mr Prescott and others that jumping on bandwagons is only wise if you have nothing to be ashamed of yourself.

The Facebook group calls for the “shredding” of Mr Prescott’s pension because of his “unquestioning loyalty” to the government. Well, casting aside the convention of collective cabinet responsibility which actually makes effective government possible in the first place, this is the same government which has been elected the last three times out, including once after the Iraq war started. It might be annoying to some (including me) that that’s happened, but it’s happened all the same. The electoral system might be flawed in some people’s view, but it has spoken loud and clear, and even under a system of PR Labour would’ve been the largest party for years now, and Prescott would have been at the heart of it. If he’s been guilty of such terrible crimes, his bosses haven’t sacked him by voting for someone else.

Yes, he’s screwed up and his screw ups have affected lots of people. But he hasn’t done it alone, and neither has Sir Fred. He isn’t evil, and neither is Sir Fred. And neither of them should have their pension pots shredded. 

Instead of campaigning to shred people’s pensions, we should be campaigning to make every pensioner in this country comfortable enough to live a happy retirement. We should use our votes wisely, do our utmost to get the best people into local and central government, and make sure of two things. First, that this type of thing is never allowed to happen again. And second, that the real injustices in every community in the country are properly addressed.

Rick