Goodwin media ban order – bizarre assault on freedom

The BBC reports that Fred Goodwin, who led the Royal Bank of Scotland to financial [caption id="attachment_1350" align="alignright" width="189" caption="This man is not a banker"][/caption] disaster bringing the UK to brink of financial catastrophe has secures one of those bizarre gagging injunctions (BBC News – MP raises Goodwin media ban order).  This one of these bizarre “super-injunctions”, which not only bans the reporting of the subject of the injunction but also bans the reporting of the existence of the injunction.  This is an astonishing crushing of press freedom really.  According to reports in the Guardian (Fred Goodwin gets superinjunction to stop him being called a banker):

“In a secret hearing this week Fred Goodwin has obtained a superinjunction preventing him being identified as a banker,” said Hemming, the MP for Birmingham Yardley.

I suppose on the one hand, this smidgeon of information isn’t unreasonable, given that he presumably isn’t a “banker’ any more, but what else is in this super-injunction, and why should reporting of it’s existence be proscribed.  Anyway, the story’s now out and around the blogosphere (e.g. The Plashing Vole) This is a man who presided over a significant component of the financial crash that afflicted the UK, and other countries, and which has seen spectacular negative effects on large swathes of the UK population, who are presently suffering a largely ideologically-driven assault (by a minority Tory government shored up by the LibDems) on many fronts.  Meanwhile, the banking system carries on regardless, awarding themselves bonuses even as the banks make losses or at best marginal profits.