RANT OF THE WEEK: Sir Fred - This Recession's Scapegoat

OH, how I am fed up of reading about Sir Fred Goodwin and his pension! Another day, and yet another series of stories about it.
Now, he's apparently walked off with another £3m - but hey wait, no he hasn't he has given it back it is reported a couple of hours later. And he's still set to claim £600k or is it £700k a year? I lose track.
To be quite honest, yes it is disgusting and stinks but it's happened and we are all fools for it.
The recession stinks and mistakes have been made so where is the scapegoat? Sir Fred fits that bill as the ex-RBS chief.
And what next?
Oh, we've got local authorities wanting to sue RBS for not revealing details of investments with Cherie Blair leading the arguments as barrister! Unbelievable! What's the point?
The sensible finance chief officer of Lancashire County Council told me he doesn't see the point - it's just lobbing more taxpayers money towards American lawyers and who loses out - we do! And why do we want to do that? This is coming from a man who is overseeing a local government pension pot losing £2.2m a day so he has a right to be angry but he is taking a considered response.
Maybe it's time the rest of us do that - including those trying to find convenient scapegoats for a wider and endemic problem.
It's about time we focused on solving it instead of looking for those to blame.

Supermassive Black Holes

IT'S time that we as tax payers stop forking out millions and millions to the pension pots of local government schemes.
Better Politics knows of one local government scheme in England which has a growing deficit of £25 A SECOND - that equates to over £2m a day. Yes, the stock market has gone down but even the scheme's own financial expert does not think it can come back to parity - it is currently £2.1bn in debt. He says there's only a 35% chance of this happening in the next 20 years!
And who pays for this in trying to plug a dying pension system? Well, surprise surprise, it's us - the tax payer. We are the mugs - again.
One pension expert thinks that one day there will be nothing in the pot left to pay out pensions. This, though, will never happen while the Government guarantees these dying gold-plated systems based on final salaries.
No one in the private sector these days can retire on final salaries yet council officers can.
We pay around £35 a year from our council tax bills to go towards other people's pensions - it's not on and it needs changing now.