Picked on

Bankers are now the villains of British society and the biggest of them is Sir Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland. As I write, every newspaper front page, every television news bulletin, every politician is pouring out the kind of loathing for him that the British usually reserve for child molesters and serial killers. Outside criminals and the occasional foreign dictator — Hitler, for example — rarely has any single individual in recent British history fomented such a froth of disbelieving rage. And what has Sir Fred done to deserve all this? He has decided to keep his pension.

By any reckoning, this is a very large pension. Sir Fred, aged fifty, can draw nearly £700,000 a year for the rest of his life. The basic state pension, payable to British men when they reach 65 (and women five years earlier), comes to about £4,700 a year. The gulf between these two figures, however, is not the cause of the outrage. Many business executives and senior public servants have generous pension schemes. What’s special about Sir Fred is that under his leadership, the Royal Bank of Scotland expanded as if there was no tomorrow, buying up other banks and insurance companies at top-dollar prices funded by massive borrowings, which was fine when the market was rising but disastrous when the market turned down; and even in 2007, when that turning-point was visible to most people, Sir Fred was so sure of himself that he went on buying.

Then came the crash. Like other banks, the Royal had to be bailed out by the government. Sir Fred took early retirement in October. His mistakes had been huge, even by the sorry standards of Western banking. Last month, his bank posted losses of £24 billion — the largest in British corporate history — and is now nationalized in all but name. The government owns more than two-thirds of its shares, a proportion set to climb with the bank’s declining assets and the heavy cost of insuring against potential losses. Hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ pounds are at stake. The truth is stark: without government money, one of the world’s biggest banks would have collapsed and Sir Fred would not have his lavish pension. So he is not just being unfairly rewarded for spectacular failure — many others are, too; he is being rewarded for spectacular failure at the expense of everyone who pays tax, including people to whom Sir Fred’s annual £700,000 is the equivalent of a lifetime’s salary.

How this was allowed to happen is a mystery. The opposition parties blame the government, the government blames the bank’s board of directors. Gordon Brown and his cabinet have tried moral blackmail by asking (‘pleading with’ is more like it) Sir Fred to heed the public mood and either forego his pension or agree to reduce it. Sir Fred has said no. His version of events is entirely believable: that the government knew of his pension when he agreed to retire, and that he sacrificed other cash entitlements by way of sweetening the deal. You can understand his position. A lucrative new job looks unlikely — an American newsmagazine has described him as ‘the world’s worst banker’ — and he may feel unfairly picked on. Many other executives are sneaking away from the ruins of financial capitalism with fat cheques in their pockets, hoping not to be noticed, and the government has found it impossible to stop bankers’ bonuses even in failing banks.

Moreover, a contract is a contract. The law would almost certainly be on Sir Fred’s side. Gordon Brown’s deputy, Harriet Harman, said that whatever a court of law might say, “the court of public opinion” found the pension unacceptable and her government would “step in”. Thereafter, her solution became rather vague. Many people — and I am one of them — think the fuss has come in handy for the Brown regime. By giving the public a human scapegoat, it has diverted attention from the failure of the economy as a whole and the part in that failure played by every government since Mrs Thatcher’s deregulation of the money business.

Here is an interesting statistic. Since 1979, the pay for chief executives of big British companies has multiplied from 17 times that of their average workers to 75 times. The rich have got a lot richer, often by the simple expedient of voting themselves more money at board meetings rather than by increasing the productivity and prospects of the companies they run. A great gap in the distribution of wealth has opened up. During the good times, it seemed that nobody much cared, apart from editorial writers in The Guardian and what remains of the British Left. At the height of the boom, it was Peter Mandelson, then as now a member of a Labour cabinet, who said he was “seriously relaxed” about people becoming “filthy rich”.

Nobody is so relaxed today. One of the country’s most senior police officers warned recently of a summer of civil disorder, fuelled by growing unemployment and anger directed at the greedy and incompetent banking classes. In a society scoured free of political ideology, addicted to the cult of celebrity, the targets are bound to be individual human beings rather than the economic system called financial capitalism — a system which, in any case, very few of us can properly understand. Sir Fred’s pension offers a safety valve for public anger — the media and politicians can let off some steam — but the pressure inside the boiler is still building.

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I suspect we’re all tired of reading about Slumdog Millionaire by now, but an essay by Salman Rushdie is worth finding on the Web. It’s a wise and informative piece, in which Rushdie debates the pros and cons of adapting films from books. The conventional wisdom is that good books rarely make good films — Rushdie mentions Pather Panchali as an exceptional example of a fine book becoming even finer art in the hands of Satyajit Ray. So what about Slumdog Millionaire? Rushdie describes Vikas Swarup’s original story, Q & A, as “a corny potboiler with a plot that defies belief”. In itself, that could be a recommendation to a film-maker: poor books often make decent films. Not in this case, however. In Rushdie’s opinion, the film “exceeds even the crassness of the book…to watch your home town’s story being told in this comically absurd, tawdry fashion is, finally, to grow annoyed”.

His most telling point, I think, concerns Slumdog’s director, Danny Boyle, who told an interviewer that he made the film because he had never been to India and knew nothing about it and thought the project offered him a great opportunity. As Rushdie says, imagine an Indian director making a movie about New York low-life on the grounds that he had never been to America before: “he would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion”. Boyle, on the other hand, is praised for his artistic daring. Rushdie concludes that “the double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away”.

He is surely right. One or two critics in Britain and America expressed reservations about the film, including Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times, but in general, Slumdog has had the sweetest of rides all the way to the Oscars. The same seems to be true of its reception in India. I don’t get it. It’s as though the audiences have left their brains at home. But that is the standard requirement of Bollywood (and Hollywood) down the ages.

In 1984, when he was convalescing from his heart surgery in Texas, Satyajit Ray went to see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the first in the series created by George Lucas and directed by Steven Spielberg. He’d been attracted by the fuss — a fuss, it should be remembered, created by adults as well as children. He saw the film in London and a day or two later, I met him at his hotel. He was still perplexed by what he had seen: “It was so childish, just a children’s film” is what I remember him saying. Slumdog, too, is a children’s film, by which I mean that its sentiments are childish. My own children loved it, despite (I hope not because of) the scenes depicting cruelty and torture. I think I know what Ray would have made of it though, and I would be on his side.