UKHamlet's Blog

Fred Hoodwink

Sir Fred Goodwin has been demonstrating massive arrogance and is entirely unrepentant about his £693,000 per annum pension from RBS – a company who he led to the biggest single loss in corporate history – an amazing £24 billion. Part of his pension was “optional” – it was also optionally approved by Lord Myers, a minister in HM Guv. Myers is having a wriggle by saying he was told it was contractual, but I think we know the truth, don’t we?

The thing is, this government is characterised by arrogance: something it gets from the bulky, brooding presence of its leader, Gordon Brown. I used to feel sorry for Gordon and though he’d gotten a bad press for being boring. No longer though. For sure, not everyone can have a vibrant, light up the room personality and Gordon certainly doesn’t. He makes you feel uneasy and he’s certainly not the guy you’re going to vote for. Sorry Gordon, you’re dead meat and frankly, you deserve it, because, really Sir Fred is just another reflection of the government of the day. Your Government, Gordon. You made the bastard, so clean up your mess.

Anyway, back to the arrogance. As I said, this government is arrogant, and so is Fred. He is one of the single most destructive forces to have hit British capitalism and he believes he has earned his pension. The problem is: HE IS CORRECT. Let’s wind it back a bit…

Fred got his nickname “The Shred” because he was very good at getting rid of jobs. His entire management system was to merge companies and shred jobs. In the halls of mammon he was almost universally admired for this. Make no mistake; they loved him as the go-to guy when it came to making money, never mind the cost. I love the irony of this: capitalism’s one redeeming feature is that it is supposed to create jobs, but its arch prince was solely adept at destroying them.

So, I owe this bloke an apology. Not because he wasn’t personally responsible for the destruction of thousands of jobs, burying the nation in debt for centuries to come, and presiding over the biggest corporate disaster in British history, because he was – but that doesn’t matter, because in free market capitalist terms, Sir Fred Hoodwink is an enormous success. Massive.

The nay-sayers will deny this and claim that capitalism needs to be remodelled because the link between success and reward has been broken, but they would be wrong. Fred is ace. He has captured the very essence of free market capitalist success. By this I mean he has made a huge amount of money. For himself. And this, after all, is what unfettered market capitalism is all about: get your nose in the trough boys, it stinks, but there’s lots of it. Fred has loads of money; ergo he is a massive success. He has looked after number one.

In so doing he has shattered the myth that capitalism is all about creating jobs for everyone, spreading wealth down to the lowest levels of society and building wealth. It isn’t – it’s about looking after the most important person in the world: you. If you do that well, then you’re a success, just like Sir Fred.

If I were in charge of a bank and I offered to give you £650,000 you would, no doubt, be very happy. If I then said to that you could have this amount of money every year for the rest of your life, I could see delirium coming on. Then imagine that you’re only forty years old and potentially have another forty or fifty years of this generosity coming your way.

Then, if I can be so bold as to stretch your credulity still further, imagine that to qualify for this you presided over the biggest banking disaster in the history of this country. A disaster you engineered by a casual disregard for the norms of good business practice and almost single handedly brought the Royal Bank of Scotland to its knees. The to top it off you went cap in hand to the government and borrowed billions of pounds from the taxpayer to cover your arse.

Welcome to the world of Sir Fred Goodwin.

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26th January 2009: I listened to a radio broadcast detailing the Burns’ night festivities in Alloway. This was, of course, on Sunday which is the real Burns’ night, as the broadcaster insisted on telling the audience every third sentence… or so it seemed. Given my Scottish antecedents, you’d have thought I’d be out celebrating the Ayrshire Bard myself, but instead I snoozed on the settee, book in hand, a glass of wine for company. Perhaps I should have opened that bottle of Jura sitting in my kitchen cupboard. 

Still, I needed to rest, because the night of nearly everyone’s celebrations – the 24th January – found me in Llandough Hospital. Not an ideal Saturday night, but fortunately, also one that saw me both free of harm and ultimately lionised for an act that brought happiness to a few lives. Let me tell you a story…

I arrived at Llandough in the middle of Saturday evening, roughly seven-thirty: this is a time tactically calculated to leave me little time to visit with a relative. Not my usual habit, I should add, just a behaviour specific to this particular relative. You would have to meet him to get the full measure of how much a displeasure this is, and it was only because my mother goaded me with guilt laden urgings that would have done a Monseigneur credit.

As I walked through the entrance to the hospital, I met with a friend and former colleague. Her reddened eyes spoke of enough to make me pause in my stride, rather than exchange warm but fleeting greetings. “What’s up?” I asked.

“Mum and Doug,” she started before dissolving. I waited, extending a hand to her shoulder as she added, choking on every word: “Doug is inside. Emphysema. Few days left. He said, he said…”

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Robin Williams once said that getting divorced was like having your balls ripped off through your wallet. My divorce was a similarly cathartic experience: after everything was paid for – solicitors, estate agents, other assorted robbing bastards and ex-wife, I was left with £12,000 of my pension and barely any of the equity in the house.

I think I probably got off lightly – however, that meant that I have to start again…. Not the best scenario for a 46 year old single bloke, so I’ve got a place in one of the less salubrious parts of Rumney down Wentloog Road, left into Greenway Road, right into Harris Avenue. It’s an ex-council house with four bedrooms and view across the playing fields – where on a Saturday night about 11:30 you can see little white bums bobbing up and down…. I’m thinking of investing in an air rifle.

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Leeway Trading Estate in Newport is one of those forgotten pieces of industrial detritus that litter the South Wales coastal plain like souvenirs from a previous economic era. It harks back to the days when someone could earn enough in a forty hour week to keep a family without supplementary benefits, a second income, a forty year mortgage, and credit cards to pay off the credit cards. Did they really exist?

You will not find a call centre anywhere near Leeway, neither will it ever be described as “Leeway Commercial Park”, but what you will find are those islands of entrepreneurial spirit that characterise the best efforts of modern Britain to earn a living as an independent spirit, free from the demands of unreasonable bosses, a cash business that fulfils the most basic of needs: the need for food. I am, of course, referring to the burger van.

There are three burger vans within walking distance of each other on the estate, but only the most centrally placed of them offers that culinary masterpiece: the hot pork sandwich, a favourite that transcends the fad diet of the moment.

If I’m hungry, and I frequently am, there is nothing more satisfying than one of Mike’s Lo Cal, hot pork sandwiches, complete with stuffing and apple sauce. He says the reason he calls it Lo Cal has nothing to do with the calorific value, but rather because it was made just around the corner, so it’s LoCal. The bread is sliced thick enough to expose the limitations of a single hinge jaw and the meat has that distinct, burger van flavour that says; “I’m extremely toxic, but anything this tasty has to be..” I can almost feel my posterior ventricle closing up whenever I eat one of these monsters, but eat them I do, and with a frequency that exposes my background as a Grangetown boy. I was brought up on Clark’s Pies and Scraps, so LoCal Pork Sandwiches have nothing with which my constitution can’t deal, with or without bypass surgery.

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Cardiff Wetlands

I went for a lovely long walk with Patch today – trying to keep up my New Year Resolution to lose weight.

We set off about nine this morning, across the playing fields at the back of my house, where semi-comatose schoolboys limbered up in sub-Beckham-esque fashion, preparing themselves for their weekly dose of parental driven gladiatorial sport. All for fun, of course.

Patch was a ball of joy; prancing and dancing between yawning, stretching, spotty, Nike clad youths like a puppy on amphetamines. I don’t think I’ve seen her so happy. God knows what got into her; perhaps it was the bright, low sun, or the chill north-easterly wind blowing into the sides of our faces. Whatever, she was rejuvenated from her recent sullen demeanour. Maybe she suffers from Subsyndromal-Seasonal Affective Disorder and the sunshine blew away her blues. Or perhaps she sensed my distress at Cardiff Rugby running up a run of fourteen successive away defeats in the European Cup, and was having a laugh at my expense. I doubt it, not even Border Collies can be that malign.

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Ibiza gets culture

I’ve been in Ibiza since Saturday. It’s changed a lot since my last visit in 1985. If you can imagine a Sluts’R’Us convention in Chav Central you’ll be somewhere near the unique ambience of this little jewel in the Med. Did I say jewel? I meant it in the tackiest possible way. If it weren’t for the aspiring footballer’s wives and the even more aspiring footballers, this place would be a ghost town, populated by a few dusty old Spanish trims and the occasional leery Algerique drug dealer.

Surprisingly, the victrix ludorum for the gobbiest bitch falls not to one of the northern tarts falling out of their ill fitting Spice Girl chic outfits. Neither is it grasped by the fleshy palms of the lardy southern girls, but instead it is taken by an Irish lass who’s stream of invective at the beach chair ticket vendor this morning needed to be heard to be believed. Even now I’m struggling to work out how she managed to fit so many expletives in one sentence. I think she meant to say that she had doubts about the veracity of the charges being imposed, but in the course of saying this, she managed to fit in the words ’fuck’ or ’fucking’ more often than all the other words put together, then rounded it off with; ’Fuck that, fucking cunt’. No wonder Ireland is the land of poets.

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Landing at Goa airport was one amongst many adventures facing us. The airport isn’t a commercial facility in the truest sense; it’s a military base that has loaned its strip to the charter companies. The only problem is; the Goan military hasn’t woken up to the fact that they’ve lost the war.

Goa is full of ancient monuments and the terminal building is the first. The next is the transfer coach. Here, I use the word “coach” advisedly. I believe both Herr Mercedes and Herr Benz were still alive when this one rolled off the production line. Moreover, I suspect Henry Ford hasn’t stopped laughing since.

Getting the bags was more of a bun-fight than usual, ably assisted by two escapees from The Kumars play Snow White and the Seven Dwarves: Miserable and Stupid. Rather than let the tourists fight amongst themselves for pecking rights at the conveyor belt, they made us crowd around one end and pulled all the bags as they came through, lining them up in the central aisle between the two belts, then unleashing the crowd in all its fury to trample over luggage, scrabble between outsize Brummies with Nike sports shirts, and dodge flying Tesco bags tossed from one of the room to the other by two athletic looking Mancunians with savagely anarchic haircuts and culturally disadvantaged clothing. The kind of guys you would like to see get on a bus going the other way. Happily they did just that and we saw neither hide nor excessively gelled hair of them for the entire fortnight.

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The phone rings, and that moment every father dreads comes crashing into your world like a steroidal bull with a hangover. A voice you have known all your life speaks, deeper now, but still the boy you knew, now a man. His tones trembling, your son says; “Dad, you got to help me….”

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A legislator somewhere is mulling over the possibility of enforced removal of offspring over the age of eighteen from the family home. That Member of Parliament, Assembly Member, Senator, or Congressperson has my vote. I’m seriously thinking of having a device fitted to my door that will prevent anyone between the ages of eighteen and thirty from entering my home without a pass for which they will need to make an application in writing a month in advance of the event. Even then, they will be sworn to obey the rules of the house:

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