The Forfeiture Committee is to consider whether it should act to strip Sir Fred Goodwin of the knighthood he received in 2004 for his services to banking. The former head of the Royal Bank of Scotland has caused widespread public and political anger after he took early retirement and subsequently got a £700,000 yearly pension from the bank he so nearly bankrupted.

Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell said that the Forfeiture Committee usually acted upon judgements by courts or relevant regulatory or professional bodies, not by public disdain. His views are not shared by all MPs. Labour backbencher Gordon Prentice said “Sir Fred was the central figure in the collapse of a major Scottish institution. In these circumstances, retaining a knighthood awarded ‘for services to banking’ strikes me as bizarre.”

So what has Sir Fred done to deserve a possible strip of his knighthood? In previous cases where an honour has been revoked there has been a clear determination of guilt. Sir Fred is guilty of several things; greed, immorality and lack of respect, but none of those are illegal. Can we just demand to punish someone simply because we don’t like them? shouldn’t we dig a little deeper within and put ourselves in Sir Fred’s shoes and acknowledge that a £700,000 pension sounds so tempting that we might have done the same thing?