Arise Fred Goodwin

Last night I came across the existence of an organisation I had never encountered before – not personally, you understand, just on the news – a shadowy agency at Westminster with a title worthy of George Orwell's 1984: The Forfeiture Committee. There is enough in that name to make the heart of the stoutest knight of the realm quake with fear - at least after last night - for this conclave of civil service enforcers has the power to strip the knight of his title, as Fred Goodwin ('Sir' yesterday, but not today) discovered to his cost. They met and recommended that he should forfeit his title after RBS, the bank he led, collapsed spectacularly with gargantuan debts in 2008. The government felt it was right to do this, even though he has not been convicted – nor even accused – of any crime. Previously only those involved in major crime or treason (think of Anthony Blunt) have endured such a fate, but it was felt that even if he was not personally responsible for much of the financial crisis that we are now in, he represented everything that went wrong in banking over the last decade, so the title had to go.

Predictably there are those who think that this is a bit like a lynch mob, singling out a very public scapegoat, and asking what about others who are guilty but have not been dealt with? After all, Fred Goodwin did not act alone; he had a board with him, so Ed Milliband is right when he said that this ought to be just the start of the change we need to see in boardrooms. Perhaps there are other civil servants and knighted worthies who ought to be sleeping a little less securely for fear that the dreaded Inquisition will catch up with and dishonour them, too.

Maybe that last phrase indicates one of the dangers in all this: that we get a McCarthy-style series of hearings that becomes a witch-hunt. We don't want that, but it has rankled with most people that men like him could be so devastatingly wrong in business (it cost the government £45 billion to bail out RBS) to the point that everyone of us is touched in some way, but then remain virtually unaffected themselves. Stripping him of a knighthood is actually quite minor, really; he still has a pension of £650,000 a year, so I don't think he is going to suffer, and certainly nothing like the tens, possibly hundreds of thousands who are losing their jobs as a result of the crisis.

It is interesting in this regard that the Bible is quite clear that a cavalier attitude to the welfare of others is a sure way of inviting the anger of God. Some of the most withering denunciations of the Bible are levelled against the rich who exploit the poor. Go to an Old Testament prophet like Amos to read his scorching indictment of the wealthy who trampled the poor while they lounged around in comfort. Or take Nehemiah who lambasted those in Jerusalem who sold fellow Jews into slavery. And then there is James in the New Testament who attacked rich landowners who failed to pay their workmen their wages. But perhaps the most poignant are the words of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, whose visions are among the wierdest and most embarrasing you will find, but the point they are making is bluntly obvious. He compares Israel of his day to the ill-fated city of Sodom that was consumed in the fire of God's judgment, but what is most significant are the crimes he cites that brought this judgment. He says that the city was “arrogant, overfed and unconcerned for the poor” to such an extent that God decided he had had enough. That comparison would have outraged Ezekiel's hearers and it should be no less shocking for us today.

We need to ask what sort of society we have created and where it is going. What would God have to say to us if he came to visit Britain, as he did Sodom, to see if the report is as bad as he has heard? He would see that the nation has cast off what it sees as the shackles of religion and faith in the name of personal liberty and choice, but he would also not fail to notice that righteousness is disappearing, too, as it did in Sodom. No nation or civilisation has the automatic right the continue as it wills, doing what it pleases, at the expense of others. The Old Testament records that superpowers like Assyria and Babylon fell under God's scrutiny for their cruelty and greed, but so did Israel. Israel made the mistake of thinking they were exempt because they were the chosen nation, but they discovered to their cost that they were not immune. God has his own Forfeiture Committee in place; maybe it is in session for us even now.