I'm not a lawyer, and I know no more about Fred Goodwin's pension than I read in the papers, but here's how it seems to me. The government took over RBS. It decided that Goodwin had to go. Goodwin would have had some protection under employment law and might have contested his dismissal, and in any event even dismissal would have contractually obliged a payment to him equivalent to about fifteen months of his salary. This might have been politically embarrassing, so intead Lord Myners talked him into taking early retirement in exchange for foregoing his fifteen months' salary payoff.
Now, however, the government is trying to renege on the deal it made, asking him to forego his pension, also. But that is surely just a straightforward attempt to trample on his employment rights: he gave up fifteen months of salary in exchange for being allowed to take his pension early. The only "discretion" involved was that inherent in the deal the government asked for: if the government hadn't exercised its "discretion" in allowing him to take his pension from age 50 then it would have had - with no discretion at all - to make him a severance payoff equivalent to fifteen months of his salary.
What I want to know is this: would all these Labour MPs and government ministers saying that it is "unacceptable" for Goodwin to receive his pension be happy for other employers to treat dismissed staff in the way they propose to treat Goodwin? Suppose that Nissan, for example, started losing money and decided it needed to shed a thousand workers in Sunderland. If it were to fire them it would have to make severance payments. Suppose that, instead, some workers agreed to take early retirement, then three months later Nissan said that, notwithstanding what had been agreed, it wasn't going to pay their pensions (and wasn't going to make severance payments instead, either). Do you think these government ministers and Labour MPs would be saying that Nissan had done the right thing, that it was "unacceptable" for these workers to receive their pensions, given that Nissan had been loss-making when it parted from them?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if we are going to renege on deals, the ones to renege on first are those with the bondholders, not the workers. Capitalism is not the friend of capitalists and the enemy of labour - that's Corporatism, as we now see in practice.
