And So Becomes the End When We Lay Blame on the Middle-Man.

The attack on Sir Fred Goodwin's home is as shocking as it is understandable. The public are feeling burned for the wayward methodologies of our government in the past 20 years or so: ultimately resulting in the demise of the world economy, but this does not make a deliberate criminal attack on what is a public citizen correct. When blame and resolution are not easily assigned, bitterness pursues and it seems easier to lay it on those who have a seemingly care-free lifestyle and more importantly on somebody who has indeed benefited from the fall of a financial empire. But thus is the work of great novelists - when an empire collapses, there will be those who gain and those who falter. Those who falter will be those who spent too long placing their trust and interest in the powers of higher institutions - without taking their own initiative to get to know the players before they lay their cards. It's a state of the world.

I hope the government will bring these vandals to justice. There are means of displaying public protest and distaste; encouraging criminality is not one of this, nor is it likely to fix our economic woes.