I ONCE interviewed Harriet Harman, Labour's deputy leader. The topic was pensions and benefits and I was looking forward to a robust, searching, intellectual joust. Harriet was only just returning to work after having had her daughter, Amy, who accompanied her into the BBC Television Centre in her convertible car-seat and, to my surprise, into the studio itself to be sat, facing the camera, on her mother's knee.
She was a lovely, bright wee thing, and before I was half way through the interview I was wishing she was the interviewee. Harriet was well briefed on benefits and pensions, but real life seemed to have passed her by, to say nothing of her child-like
inability to grasp concepts that she didn't like. For someone who had studied law, she was remarkably untainted by the dictates of logic and proven facts.
It seems that the years since then have had little effect on Harriet Harman's view of life, the universe and everything. She must be good at some aspects of politicking, or she wouldn't have been successful in the ballot for Labour's deputy leadership. But she doesn't seem to have picked up the essential skill of separating what she'd like to do from what is possible in the circumstances. Politics is said to be the art of the possible and sometimes that means, to obtain an objective, the tactics have to be one step at a time, or maybe "softly, softly, catchy monkey".
Like the rest of us, Harriet was scandalised by the size of Sir Fred Goodwin's pension pot. So, speaking with all the authority of her office, if not all her marbles, she warned Sir Fred not to count on being able to live high on the hog on the £693,000 per annum that he had agreed with RBS. Now, note the verb "agreed". It doesn't prove or even imply he had done a bunk with the money, or had blackmailed the board members into waving through his previously agreed pot plus an extra £8 million. But he has displayed a complete disregard for the damage he has done, even inadvertently, to the bank, its employees and shareholders.
Nobody has suggested he deliberately set out to ruin RBS, or if not ruin, at least damage Scotland's reputation for competence and probity in financial affairs. But his mismanagement was of such a magnitude that it outweighs any of the RBS's solid business successes. These were overwhelmed by the lending policy and the extravagant acquisition of a Dutch company with dodgy performance indicators.
It is morally wrong for Sir Fred to negotiate and/or accept rewards when the accepted outcome of such failure as the bank experienced under his leadership would have seen him sacked. But it is not proved that he, or the directors who settled the terms of his pension, did anything illegal.
So for Harriet's words to be anything more than the sincere but untutored, emotional but illogical spasm of anger experienced by the woman on the No 22 bus, she had better dig out her old textbooks and start with the employment section to see if any laws were broken.
And here I'm prepared to pass on a tip: she should ask her husband to help her go through the relevant employment and other laws, just in case there is a legal case to be made for re-examining the pension decision. Like my unpaid researcher and former STUC official, trade union official Jack Dromey has learned how to investigate, analyse and then use proven facts to pursue a campaign or get things changed.
In the case of Fred's pension, it would probably be more profitable to start at the other end of the equation and ask Jack to delve into who knew what, and when. He should try to discover if the board was in possession of the full facts of RBS's affairs when it signed off Sir Fred Goodwin's pension.
That's what I'm trying to find out by another route. The FSA has said it regularly produces reports on the state of the various banks' affairs, under the counter so to speak. I'm currently trying to obtain copies of their reports on RBS for the year leading up to last October, when the deal was done.
If it transpires the board members concerned with Sir Fred's pension deal concluded the matter without seeing the FSA report, it might be possible to obtain an interim interdict to prevent the pension being paid until the facts are re-examined.
It might not be possible, but it would still be the way to go about repairing the trust that's been broken between the banks and their customers. Trust will hardly be rebuilt by politicians who ignore legal outcomes they don't agree with . . . like dictators everywhere.
