Well, that's going to make us all feel a lot better.

Sometimes I despair of the Brits' love of scapegoating. Together with an overdeveloped sense of schadenfreude it's one of our grimmer national traits. What those idiots did to Goodwin's house is the modus operandi that was approved of by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness  before they attempted to become respectable.

While the bitter accusations fly and the rancour grows, I wonder how many folk out there are actually starting to realise that the burst bubble had something to do with them and their choices. Something to do with those feckless opportunists who took a 110% mortgage on four times combined salary - and doubtless on an interest-only basis with no hope of ever repaying the capital - because they believed it was their birthright to be a member of the property-owning classes.

Well caveat emptor, pal. Don't go crying to a member of the Dispatches or Panorama research teams blaming somebody else for your lousy judgment when you can't pay the mortgage and you can't sell the property for anything like you owe on it. That's the downside of capitalism. If you want to embrace Mao's Little Red Book or a liquidation of the kulaks, fine. Otherwise realise that what goes up tends sometimes to come down with a thump.

Part of the deal of the 'something  for everyone' culture is a degree of personal responsibility. You have to know how to add up and budget. What you can afford and what you cannot. Work out as Mr Micawber did the hard way that if you earn £20 a year and are spending £20.06 then the result may well be misery when the banks change their minds and decline to support your profligacy.

You cannot just lay the blame for what has happened at Fred Goodwin and Bernie Madoff's door. They were very determined opportunists with hugely faulty judgments and morals who made the most of the fact that we have all been dwelling in la la land for a decade or more.

I happen to think that many of those who have toiled in shadow banking over this period are worthless, grasping and amoral Midgets of the Universe who, in their lust for deals, have added sod all value. But that's neither here nor there. I'll find it as satisfying as you will if Dick Fuld and a few AIG executives wind up running around the prison yard in a orange boiler suit. But that doesn't solve the mess. Acknowledging that it was all of us who enjoyed the sun while it was out might be a good start when learning how to cope with the storm that is now battering us.

I’m no fan of Sir Fred Goodwin. In the boom years whenever MT contacted RBS in search of an interview with him, we were met with sneers - if we actually got a return call. The outfit was hubris writ large. They got what was coming to them. 

But I spoke this week to a female business grandee who has run some large organisations in the UK and sat on the boards of several others. She was shocked at the venom being directed towards Goodwin. 'It’s amazing,' she said. 'I’ve had to fire people for criminal culpability and they left without any compensation. But they kept their pension. You can’t take away their pension.' Goodwin may have been a swollen-headed, ruthless son-of-a-gun whose woeful judgement led his organisation into the mire. But he’s not a criminal. Bernie Madoff’s a thief but Fred isn’t. He had a contract enforceable in law and you cannot break that contract.

What’s happened to our banking system brings out the worst in the British. The relentless search for a scapegoat to be marched out in front of the public and left swinging on Tyburn Tree is an ugly business. It’s the same sort of hysterical tabloid mentality that seeks to hunt down child-molesters and burn them out of their homes. However much damage he’s caused, what can be the justification for creating a mood so ugly that the man is forced to take his kids out of school because he feared for their safety?

No. I’d rather all those clever dicks in government and the Treasury expended their energy, emotional and cerebral, on getting us out of this mess rather than stoking up mob wrath over one man’s pension. It’s a dead end street (albeit a convenient distraction from their own role in proceedings).

I knew things had gone too far when Harriet Harman weighed in with her nonsense. What Ms Harman knows about business and contract law could be written on the back of a cigarette packet. A packet of ten. A Labour grandee, despairing of Brown’s unpopularity and inability to win next year's election, told me recently that Harriet has 'cut-through' with middle England, especially among women; that she might be the answer to fend off Cameron. I’ve never met Ms Harman, but I suspect I wasn't alone in a wry snigger when I saw those Fathers 4 Justice outlaws on her roof last year. At best, you could say that she divides opinion - so if that's the best they can come up with, Labour are in almost as much trouble as Sir Fred.

I have booze on the brain at the moment, as I’ve just given it up for Lent. One suspects, in this new Age of Austerity, a lot of fellow atheists will be giving things up for Lent this year – spending money, mostly. Anyway, the Scots - showing yet again their conviction that the state knows best – are mulling over banning the sale of ultra-cheap alcohol, by placing a minimum price per unit on booze. Bad news for those retailers who enjoy the footfall caused by hawking 24 cans of lager for £7.

On the face of it, things do look fairly grim up North of the border. Official figures apparently show that there were 42,430 alcohol-related discharges from Scottish hospitals in 2007-08, a 20% increase over five years. The Scots also have the eighth-highest level of alcohol consumption in the world. This is a tricky issue for the Scottish executive, because the malaise it suggests needs rectifying reinforces the stereotype of the country as a latter day Hogarthian Gin Lane, peopled by Rab C Nesbitts and politicians who get smashed and then set other people’s curtains on fire.

The answers suggested could also be unfair – the Tories have already labelled them horribly flawed. Minimum prices are unlikely to affect members of the Cloudy Bay swilling classes, but those lost souls in search of a cheap hit in tough times on a Saturday night.

There’s little doubt that our whole nation has a booze problem, though. A large chunk of our number still drinks to get legless rather than to enter a milder, more convivial mind-altered state. There will come a time when the teetotal tax-paying masses rise up in protest at the colossal bill that the alcohol-dependent run up. It takes one of the more foresighted alcohol producers like Diageo to realise that its reputation is going to require careful attention over the coming years as the heat moves away from tobacco to the demon drink as Public Enemy Number Two (Fred Goodwin and his friends in banking will retain the top spot for some time yet). You won’t find Diageo’s brands being destroyed by insane price-cutting.

The problem with fiddling with alcohol tax is the extent to which consumers will try to get round it. The Scandinavians have been struggling with this for years.  And remember the days of smuggling beer across the Channel and into Kent, when the milkman was able to provide 20 cans of wife-beating Stella with a couple of pints of gold top? Still, it’s all academic for me, as it’s ginger beer for the next four weeks before my bottle of Veuve Cliquot in the fridge gets opened at Easter.

In today's bulletin:
HSBC launches record rights issue as profits slump 60%
I was dumb, says Warren Buffett
Editor's blog: The great British booze problem
Ryanair: in for a penny, in for a pound
Do it right: Seven ways to manage team morale