A wunch of bankers

So, they have annulled Fred Goodwin’s knighthood. Serve him right? He was clearly motivated by greed to gamble with other people’s security. Mind you, we tolerated this – and our government did not challenge his obscene bonuses – as long as he kept rolling a double six.

On the one hand, we might ask whether his punishment is sufficient. In China they go to the other extreme. Adulteration of baby milk by Sanlo led to a scandal of Nestlé proportions – such that it was necessary to jail protesting parents – and dealers Zhang Yujun and Geng Jinping were executed. Of course, China is run by a bunch of commie tyrants. Couldn’t they just have annulled their fishing permits, say, like any civilised nation? We can’t be handing out serious penalties to oligarchs.

On the other hand, I wonder where else we might apply a similar sanction to that inflicted on Mr Goodwin. If an award “for services to banking” (i.e. for making money) can be revoked if one loses money, then can a lifetime Oscar be revoked if the recipient turns out a couple of real turkeys? Or all those Oscars for Titanic, if we ever decide it was actually quite a dull film?

Olympic medals are already routinely withdrawn from people who turn out to have been using drugs. (But not from the steroid-pumped East German women swimmers from the 60s, 70s and 80s. Why not?)

Then there’s Henry Kissinger. Suppose someone spotted that he was involved in the bombing of Cambodia, not to mention Operation Condor: might the Nobel people cancel his Peace Prize? And what about Menachem Begin? 

And if we’re thinking about Nobel Prizes, then let’s not forget Milton Friedman, winner of the Economics prize in 1976. This is the guru behind Thatcher’s Cainite policies (not noticeably changed by her successors), which have allowed some people – such as Fred Goodwin – to become very rich. Hooray! But their fortune has come at great cost to others (and to society, if we still believe that such a thing exists). Now that we know this, now that we have seen the despair and the decay, is it time to annul Friedman’s prize along with Goodwin’s honour?