'If I don't get a seven figure bonus this year, I'm emigrating' I threatened my boss.He laughed.
So I rang Prime Minister David Cameron's Office and repeated my threat, emphasising how ruinous to the economic recovery my departure would be if this country were not prepared to renumerate the top rate to the top people.
Ok, so I didn't really phone David Cameron's office, but you get the picture.
How come bankers can hold this country to ransom, and not even over their obscene salaries, but their obscene BONUSES? And believe it or not, the actual industry term is 'compensation' (???????)
Why do the rest of we employees (most of whom do not even receive bonuses) lack this snake-like mesmerism over our government to persuade them that our workaday mediocrity is actually genius in disguise so that they live in terror of us hightailing our talents elsewhere?
If ALL banks were capped by the government at the £2,500 max per banker pledged by the LibDem government when they came to power, where are they all going to go in protest? There are only so many top banking jobs abroad paying even more, and other countries may actually follow suit if they see Britain taking a firm stand as many can no more afford it than we can in a worldwide recession. Plus countries such as Dubai are on the edge of bankruptcy in their own right, having been constructed on a house of cards known as debt. Greece has already toppled over the edge. Spain is teetering. Japan and China will soon get over the novelty of their newfound wealth and realise they don't have to pay these a-holes as much as they think.
I firmly suspect if we lost half, we wouldn't even notice, so they don't scare me with their threats to emigrate. And let's not forget they're the ones who got the banks into the mess they're in, forcing us to bail them out in the first place, so they should be incurring performance penalties and paying US compensation, not to mention actually acting in our interests!
Why would we need people at the top of the financial pyramid who regard our savings as casino chips? This was never the way banks used to behave before they watched 'Wall Street' and decided it was a documentary. They used to be solid institutions we all trusted and we were rewarded with stability and predictable steady growth in return. Old fashioned things known as 'Codes of Conduct' also kept them in check.
Hardly thrilling, but then losing your hard-earned pension or life savings is hardly thrilling to the victim, yet from the 1994 Lloyds name scandal to today, it seems not a fig has been learned. Or earned by these wondrous winged beings in charge of our piggy banks.
I remember when 9/11 happened in 2001, a financial expert on TV predicted the whole world would suffer at the loss of at least 1500 top people in the financial world. Not a word more did I ever hear on the subject, so perhaps the loss was entirely personal, to their friends and families, rather than the global economy.
