Wednesday, February 01, 2012 – 03:01 PM

The Polish Ambassador to Ireland has written to the Irish Independent
concerning a “potentially inflammatory” article published by the
newspaper today.

The article, quoting from a report in Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza
newspaper, claimed that a Polish woman – using the pseudonym ‘Magda’ -
has been speaking about living the good life in an unidentified
Donegal town, while claiming unemployment and other benefits.

However, Poland’s Ambassador to Ireland Marcin Nawrot in a letter to
the Independent said the article had been translated incorrectly from
the original piece published last Sunday, and contains inaccuracies.

The front-page report in today’s Independent bears the headline
“Welcome to good life on welfare – how Polish waitress embraced La
Dole-ce Vita”.

However in his letter, Ambassador Nawrot said the authors of the
Independent report use the facts presented in the Polish article in “a
very selective and subjective manner”.

“The subject ‘Magda’ states in the Polish article: ‘I have a big
problem with being unemployed, I don’t want to live at the State’s
expense and for that reason I use this assistance to allow me start up
my own business’,” Ambassador Nawrot wrote.

“I believe that this is the sentence that best summarizes the context
of the original article and it is decidedly unfortunate that it has
been omitted in your article.”

He said the report – which describes the life of the 36-year-old woman
on Irish welfare benefits – is potentially inflammatory and risks
causing an anti-immigrant atmosphere.

“The decision to remain in Ireland that so many Polish people made in
the recent years is a decision to make a valuable contribution to the
Irish state by living and working here, integrating with the Irish
society and being a part of it all in good times and bad,” he wrote.

“It’s impossible to imagine that this decision, sometimes a very
painful one, is made on the basis of the level of unemployment benefit
or other kinds of support granted to the jobless by the Irish State.”

The Independent article has been the subject of heated debate online
and in national media today, as the subject is claimed to have
described her life on Irish welfare as a “Hawaiian massage”.

However Ambassador Nawrot denied that this statement had been made in
the original Polish article.

“What she actually says is that she has completed a FÁS course in
Hawaiian Massage and that she’s planning to open a massage business
next year,” the Ambassador wrote.

Meanwhile Donegal Labour Senator Jimmy Harte – who was contacted by
the Independent about the article – said he wasn’t given the full
story and he’d happily take his comments back if the article is wrong.

Senator Harte had told the Independent that ‘Magda’ was “doing an
enormous disservice to the Polish community in Co Donegal”, and
offered to pay for her flight home.

The City bonus culture is the financial sector’s version of Mine’s
Bigger than Yours. No one in British banking was a bigger Willy Waver
than Sir Fred Goodwin. His unchecked ego led the then chief executive
of the Royal Bank of Scotland to purchase a diseased Dutch bank with
slightly less care than your average person would take to buy a
kettle. Testosterone Fred had to have ABN Amro; nothing and no one
could stop him getting his hands on a prize which was worth “a whole
load of nothing”, according to one horrified analyst.

The result was the worst financial disaster in British history; the
taxpayer had to prop up the bank to the tune of £45.5 billion. Some
tune; more like an unending funeral march. We will not know the exact
toll in human misery for years to come, but at least Fred Goodwin has
now been stripped of his knighthood – a humiliation described by one
wag as Sircumcision.

For the ultimate Willy Waver to be Sircumcised feels like poetic
justice, and long overdue, but protests began immediately that this
was “mob rule” and anti-business “hysteria”. The Government, critics
shrieked, had “bowed to public anger”. Shocking in a democracy to
accede to what most decent people believe is only fair and right,
isn’t it? If seeing a man lose a privileged title for his arrogant
folly is mob rule, then kindly pass this tricoteuse her knitting
needles.

Last week, I got a huge response when I asked nicely if it might be
possible to put a single banker in jail. Surely, amidst all the false
accounting, dodgy loans and downright lies to shareholders, one teensy
criminal act must have taken place? There was an indignant response
from financial executives, one of whom accused me of having a
“juvenile grasp” of economics. (Gee, that’s praise indeed coming from
a banker.) Everyone else bellowed: “Why only one?”

Quite simply, we are fed up of what the Financial Times calls the
“unrepentant demeanour” of Fred Goodwin and his ilk. We are fed up of
a bonus culture which says that senior people need “incentives” to do
million-pound jobs. This time last year, when the Barclays boss Bob
Diamond insisted that the “period of remorse and apology for banks”
needed to be over, many of us scratched our heads and wondered if we
had somehow missed the period of remorse and apology. Had it taken
place during an episode of Downton Abbey, perhaps, and we hadn’t
noticed?

It is entirely right to take away Fred Goodwin’s knighthood for
“services to banking” when banking has been done such a grotesque
disservice. There are many terrific, responsible men and women in the
financial sector who do a huge amount of philanthropic and charitable
work; their good names have been sullied by Testosterone Fred. The
honours system allows a title to be taken away if an individual is
censured by the regulatory body in the area for which they were
knighted. On Monday, Hector Sants, head of the Financial Services
Authority, told a Treasury committee that Fred Goodwin and other RBS
executives criticised in the FSA’s 2008 report are “not fit” to run a
bank and should never again work in regulated financial services. That
sounds a lot like censure to me.

Chancellor George Osborne said that Fred Goodwin and the fiasco at RBS
came “to symbolise everything that went wrong in the British economy
in the last decade”. So the Sircumcision has great symbolic force.
Symbols are important for a good society. Arrogant, reckless men
should not walk off into the sunset with a noble title and a £342,500
pension while the innocent suffer. Stephen Hester forgoing his bonus
is another step in the right direction. The overall bonus pot at RBS’s
investment arm, to be revealed before February 23, is expected to be
half the £950 million it was last year. The public – not the mob,
thank you – is entitled to ask whether a bank should be distributing
lottery-win bonuses to individuals whose jobs only exist because of
our cash.

The case for an inquiry into the behaviour of the financial services
industry, the auditors who didn’t audit, the regulators who didn’t
regulate and the Government which turned a blind eye in the run-up to
the crash is overwhelming. Changing nothing is not an option.

Helena Morrissey, the excellent chief executive of Newton Investment
Management who got a CBE in the New Year’s Honours List, founded the
30% Club to campaign for more women on UK boards, with a target of
women making up 30 per cent of FTSE 100 directors by the end of 2015.
At a recent event at RBS in London, Helena asked a huge roomful of
staff a question: “Who thinks the financial crisis might have been
averted if more women had been on boards?” Almost every person, male
or female, raised their hand in agreement.

Afterwards, Helena told me she had decided to go back and look at the
composition of the RBS board when Fred Goodwin was allowed to act like
a doberman on heat. “It was extraordinary,” she said, “I mean, you’d
expect them all to be white men of a certain age, but the astonishing
thing was that many of the board actually lived in the same Edinburgh
street as Fred Goodwin.”

The same street, dear reader. That was the chummy bunch of Scottish
chaps who looked after their own interests and wrecked ours. If Helena
Morrissey prevails, and I hope she does, then in future there will be
plenty of oestrogen to dilute the testosterone Freds. That’s the nice
thing about women. They don’t have willies to wave.
By Allison Pearson

9:30PM GMT 01 Feb 2012