Comparative morality: Tracey Connolly and Sir Fred Goodwin
Posted on Tuesday 18 August, 2009
Filed Under Society
UNTIL someone comes up with a scale that facilitates such measurement, it remains logically meaningless to weigh up the morality of Tracey Connolly, and then judge it against the morality of Sir Fred Goodwin. The actions that these two people have perpetrated, and the impact these actions have had on others, vary enormously in scale, extent and degree.
The specific details of the harm inflicted on Baby P – the broken back, the eight fractured ribs, the ripped ear, the injuries to lips and tongue, the missing fingertip – can of course more easily be distilled into tabloid hate prose than the intricacies of investment banking.
Reread the justification advanced by the group calling itself bankbossesarecriminals@mail.com when putting bricks through the window of Fred the Shred’s Edinburgh home earlier this year, and the charge sheet seems broader and more diffuse, yet somehow anonymous. His victims are the category ‘ordinary people’, not a named individual kid:
We are angry that rich people, like him, are paying themselves a huge amount of money, and living in luxury, while ordinary people are made unemployed, destitute and homeless. This is a crime. Bank bosses should be jailed. This is just the beginning.
Socially speaking, Connolly and Goodwin stand in reciprocal relationship to one another, at extremes that most of us will never experience.
The designation ‘underclass’ rightly comes with a health warning. But if it is restricted to a layer permanently detached from the mainstream working class – the people traditionally described in Marxist theory as lumpenproletarian – then it does merit limited specific application.
Similarly, there is now a superbourgeoisie, for want of a better word. These people are rich not in the everyday sense of earning six-figure salaries, but in the sense of being the beneficiaries of bonuses worth millions of pounds, year after year after year.
Strictly speaking, they are an element within the ruling class, but ‘overclass’ serves as useful shorthand notation for this element in our society.
Sir Fred, we read in The Times today, has returned to Edinburgh after taking five months’ time out on the French Riviera, in a £4m villa outside Cannes. An unnamed mate insists that he ‘accepts he made mistakes’. Good.
Meanwhile, Connolly has commenced her five-year prison sentence. Given the gravity of her offences, that punishment seems rather light. But every account makes clear that this woman is a pathetic, frightened and damaged individual who seems to have fallen into her way of life more by accident than design.
Goodwin, on the other hand, is a highly educated master of the universe who knew what he was doing, every step of the way. Precisely because of his responsibility for his own actions, he deserves rather more opprobrium than the amount to which he is currently subject.
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15 Responses to “Comparative morality: Tracey Connolly and Sir Fred Goodwin”
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Frightened? Don’t make me laugh. And if she’s that fucking damaged, she needs to be locked up under medical supervision for the rest of her life, not let out in 3 years’ time to sell her story to the press and become the next fucking Jade Goody thanks to revisionist bollocks like this.
Obnoxio,
Somehow I don’t think she will be selling her story to the press in 3 years time. But I can see Sir Fred Goodwin being rehabilated by the British press in a few years time.
It now becomes clear that the City is untouchable. The short period of bankers contrition is over. They have said their three Hail Marys. Bankers are thumbing their noses, not only at Darling but also at Osborne. With no industry left, the City is the only major source of income for the government and they know it. Watch now for the revisionist history they are writing called, “It wasn’t just us that caused the recession.”
Hmm, I can see the point you’re trying to make here Dave but I think you’re on shaky ground. Leaving aside the usual shit you are bound to get from the tabloids the basic issue here is personal responsibility, something on which the Left doesn’t perform very well.*
However, it’s only natural that there will be a much greater opprobrium met against those who contributed to the death of a small child than those who basically helped to fuck up the banking system.
Yes, I’ve read the sociology textbooks regarding the issue of working class crime and middle class ‘mistakes’ and yes, the hypocrisy stinks. But a life is still a life, and once extinguished shall never return. Those affected by the actions of Goodwin at least have the chance to pick up their lives and move on. As such I think Connolly deserves the greater condemnation and the prison sentence to boot.
*Maybe you could consider a future post on the Left and personal responsibility. I may be wrong but the scarcity of responses to your post here may indicate that us ‘Reds’ have work to do on the matter.
Or maybe everyone’s out having a good time except meee!
Surely placing purely personal responsibility on Goodwin and other bankers is missing the point?
The fire of socialists should be concentrated on the system, of which bankers are simply rich functionaries. Despite the initial sense of outrage felt towards sections of the banking community, there still exists the feeling that Goodwin’s actions were just taking things a bit too far, getting ‘carried away’ if you like. So the banking system as a whole can pin the blame on a few scapegoats and many on the left also seem to go along with this.
@Igor Belanov. The point I’m trying to make is that simply blaming ‘the system’ isn’t enough. Yes we have a capitalist social organisation which is more, rather than less likely to spawn characters like the Shred. But we shouldn’t fall injto the trap that says capitalism is so powerful, so domineering that it controls the actions of men- this is way too deterministic. That viewpoint leaves little or no room for personal agency.
Correct me if I’m wrong but Marx said something along the lines “people make their own actions in circumstances they didn’t create”. Goodwin didn’t *have* to do what he did. Nobody put a gun to his head, the ‘system’ didn’t force him via voices in his head. C’mon, can you see him saying “it woz the system wot made me do it guv”.
Peoples’ actions, or at least motives can be informed by a particular set of circumstances but that doesn’t mean they *have* to take those actions.
I wuold suggest that agency (is that the right word?) and a sense of personal responsiblity have the potential to transcend even a stitch-up system like ours.
And therein lies the possibility…of hope.
BTW is there any way to write in italics here? It’s starting to piss me off.
@Johnny UK
I’m not arguing that Goodwin isn’t personally responsible for his actions, but that he was behaving in a fashion that was totally within the logic of the business in which he was operating. He didn’t do anything illegal and many people wouldn’t even have considered his actions unethical. If all bankers were ‘nice’ and acted in terms of social justice then their existence would be in jeopardy within the type of capitalist system we’re in at the moment. You can’t simply blame the likes of Goodwin for the excesses of capitalism.
Firstly I think we should point out the failings of capitalism and say that while the greed of people like Goodwin is abhorent this is a sytematic problem.
Secondly I think comparing the actions of Connolly with the killing exploits of our own elected state in Iraq and Afghanistan would have been more interesting and asked harder questions of people.
I think the problem with blaming Fred Goodwin is that this assumes that it’s possible for anyone (Johnny: if the italics worked, they were achieved using the ‘em’ html tag) to understand the workings of the economy. It’s hard to point to a specific ‘mistake’ that he made; at best we can blame him for ignorance, but it’s only after the fact that we can say definitively what he was ignorant of. Prior to the crash happening, the crash itself didn’t seem inevitable (though lots of people now claim to have seen it coming) and so it would have been difficult to prove that he was doing anything wrong.
In normal businesses, CEOs get things wrong and make mistakes all the time. To err is human, and all that. Sometimes these mistakes drive companies out of business, and what’s really problematic about the banks is that we couldn’t allow that to happen (or perhaps we could have; either way, we didn’t feel like finding out what would happen). What the crisis does prove is that the man behind the curtain is just a finite human intelligence, as incapable of comprehending complexity on the global economic scale as the rest of us.
The tools at Goodwin’s disposal (the armies of quants, statisticians and economists) failed him. Perhaps he should have overruled the expensively-educated specialists and called an end to the madness. Perhaps he should have known in his gut that gravity hadn’t been abolished after all. Any personal criticism of him rests on this conjecture. It is an argument that Goodwin was insufficiently small-c conservative.
However, for most of the last decade we’ve all benefited from Goodwin and co.’s experiments. They made cheap credit available to all and drove up living standards and barely a soul complained. Perhaps, with a little more luck, they might have kept things going longer and perhaps the tools of economic analysis would have advanced to the point where the underlying problems could have been solved without such pain. For the life of me I can’t decide whether I’d rather have banks run by arch small-c conservatives or starry-eyed idealists who believe that economic growth can go on forever. On a long enough timescale I suspect that the latter group are more right than the former, but that’s just me, and I suspect I’m going off-topic…
Cheap goods from China etc drove up living standards you idiot.
The “cheap” credit came at a price, the Goodwin’s of this world don’t sell products at a loss!!
And the idealists who believed economic growth could go on forever were capitalist (“small c Conservatives”) apologists. We on the left, however, know that crises are inevitable in capitalism.
We on the left knew that ficticious capital was being created at the expense of real wealth, while the “small c conservatives” lived with the fairies.
And while ordinary workers pay the price, the people who really profited from this catastrophe get away relatively unscathed!
You are correct about one thing, ditch idealism and see capitalism for the stinking system that it is!
Rob, for most of the past decade I’ve alternated between unemployment and a succession of temporary jobs paying at most £280 a week, while all around me the cost of housing and basic necessities climbed higher and higher on a rickety framework of pretend money backed by nothing but a loan shark’s smile. Anecdotal, sure, but you want to be more careful when you say “we’ve all benefited… and barely a soul complained. It didn’t look that way from here.
Scott: That’s the down-side of democracy, I guess. People tend not to notice the fact that society’s rules don’t work for everyone. I don’t think I’m wrong when I said “barely a soul complained”.
Johnno – you’re right, although I can’t imagine your rhetoric is going to convert many people. The conclusion that I left off my over-long comment was that my ideal future is one that doesn’t have banks in their present form at all, which I assume is something we can all agree on (rather than apportioning blame to individuals).
Sorry Rob, I misunderstood your point. I think to look at things purely systematically and see everyone as an unconscious actor in the big machine may have certain merits but sometimes a bastard is just a bastard!
Vulgar determinism is the last refuge of the intellectually lazy, and not very convincing for all of that.
I am not sure it is lazy thinking but I agree it isn’t very convincing.
I think one difference between the right and left is that the left tend to see humans as being born equal but then moulded by their environment. (upbringing etc), whereas the right like to think of people having inate abilities, the cream rising to the top.
Both seem like ideology getting in the way of critical thinking.