UK banker humiliated by loss of knighthood
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Goodwin shaming tawdry: Darling
Alistair Darling says Fred Goodwin was treated unfairly and singled out for punishment after being stripped of his knighthood.
DISGRACED ex-banker Fred Goodwin has been humiliat-ingly stripped of his knighthood by Queen Elizabeth.
The award was "cancelled and annulled" by the monarch after a key committee found that he had brought Britain's honours system into "disrepute".
Politicians hailed the move, which brackets the former Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) boss with notorious figures such as the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt and Zimbabwe's leader Robert Mugabe, both of whom also lost their knighthoods.
Prime Minister David Cameron said it was the "right decision", while his chancellor George Osborne added that Mr Goodwin represented "everything that went wrong in the British economy over the last decade".
Labour leader Ed Miliband said the punishment was "only the start of the change that we need" in boardrooms.
Mr Goodwin received his knighthood for services to banking under the Labour government, before guiding RBS to the brink of collapse in 2008.
Honours are usually only removed from individuals who have been convicted of criminal offences and jailed.
But the Cabinet Office said that the scale of the RBS disaster -- which necessitated a £45bn (€54bn) bailout from the British taxpayer -- made this case "exceptional".
- James Tapsfield and Daniel Bentley in London
Irish Independent
