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Johnstone's View 11th March 2009

Poor old Fred Goodwin.    Who would want to be him with his seven hundred thousand pounds a year pension?   Plenty I would guess but with the story dragging on in the newspapers I bet he feels he has earned it.   Not that I have any more sympathy for him than anyone else.   My problem with him, however, is that whatever he was being paid as Chief Executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, he did a poor job.   Easy to be wise after the event I know, but that is what he was paid the big money for – the buck stops with him.

The reason I mention Sir Fred, however, is not to rake over the circumstances one more time, but rather to take a step back and look at what it tells us about ourselves.   We all value our privacy and go to great lengths to protect it.   We lock our doors and we close our curtains.   We keep our lives to ourselves and defend our right to do so.   We are rightly outraged when any government department or financial institution asks for private information about ourselves or our families.   We are disgusted when that information is lost, stolen or passed to anyone who should not have had access to it.

It is strange then, that at the same time our appetite as a society to know everything about everyone else has never been greater.   I don’t mean the twitching of net curtains or the occasional overheard conversation, that is just human nature, isn’t it?   No, what I mean is the kind of interest in other people’s private lives which has become the stock-in-trade of our tabloid newspapers.   Remember though, we cannot blame the papers themselves because it is you and I who buy them, and in ever increasing numbers as the serious press declines.

And then there are the endless series of magazines which serve no other purpose than to invite us to stare into the goldfish bowl in which the rich, the powerful and the famous live out their existence.   Of course, these people are usually complicit in the process but our interest seems undiminished.

This appetite for facts about other people’s lives extends into many of the areas which we ourselves would choose to keep private and has lead to legislation like the “Freedom of Information Act” which entitles any person in Scotland to access any information held on public record.   It also lead to the Scottish Parliament’s Register of Interests being considerably more comprehensive than anything which had gone before when it was extended to cover the families and staff of the elected members.

Next, we are all outraged at the huge salaries and pensions paid to people like Sir Fred Goodwin and others like him.   So outraged are we that we demand that something be done about it and, seeing how angry the people have become, even our leading politicians, secretly pleased that the gaze has been turned on someone else for a change, jump on the bandwagon of public opinion, even if it was their fault in the first place!

We all value our privacy but the growing clamour to know everything about everyone has become an endless crescendo which our political leaders are finding impossible to ignore.   Our demands for more control over the lives and circumstances of those in the public eye is the defining characteristic of our age and the pressure to act is almost irresistible.

The law, of course, cannot differentiate between individuals.   It applies to us all equally – we are all equal before the law.   The desire to impose tighter control on anyone can only lead to the imposition of tighter control on everyone.   This is the most authoritarian trend in public opinion I have observed in my lifetime.   If followed by our governments, north and south of the border, it will lead to a form of totalitarian government which we have never seen before in peace time.

Yet who amongst us would admit to a desire for bigger government with more power to direct us in how we live our lives?   The exclamation, “It shouldn’t be allowed!” is often heard but seldom understood.   I assure you, you do not want any more politicians who believe they have the right to ban the things of which they disapprove.

We British have a proud record of resisting anyone who would try to take away our freedom.   Whether the threat has been political or military, we have always been up to meeting that challenge.   The danger now, however, is that we may be ready to give it up without a fight.

We must all be prepared to defend our privacy and our liberty.   Without them, we will have no democracy.