There is, I am convinced, an unbridgeable gulf of misunderstanding between those who think RBS chief executive Stephen Hester should have kept his £1m bonus, and those rejoicing that he gave it up.
To the bankers and City big cheeses, Hester is an extremely competent executive doing a service to the bank – and therefore to the British taxpayer which owns 83 per cent of the bank – for which a £960,000 bonus, on top of a basic salary of over £1m, is very much the going rate for the job.
These people think Hester has been subjected to a kangaroo court of public opinion and opportunistic political carping, and that the fallout will be a reluctance by some high-fliers to take on such a poisoned chalice in future.
But to Joe Public, Hester, with his hunting pink, and his holiday home in Verbier, looks like someone who has had one too many good dinners, probably at our expense, and for whom another million is mere pocket fluff. Denying him that million gives us a warm feeling.
We are told that there is a global market for business and banking talent. Like all those mercenary footballers whose loyalty must be constantly massaged with enormous amounts of money, we must supposedly shower top executives with wealth to stop them flouncing off in search of bigger bucks.
But, in common with about 99.9 per cent of the British population, I don't see why someone already being paid over a million quid a year needs a “bonus”, let alone a bonus of another million quid. Where else in the world of work does such a system apply?
But it is not just bankers who now earn sums that ordinary folk cannot comprehend. It is, yes, those £200,000-plus-a-week footballers, hedge fund managers, captains of industry, our former prime minister Tony Blair, TV executives, even local government chiefs and the managers of what were once nationally-owned utility companies.
The disparity between those at the top and those at the bottom grows at an alarming rate. For example, the job of chief executive of Barclays now commands a salary 50 times what it did in 1980. Average pay across of all Barclays staff, though, has risen just three-fold in that time.
Chief execs of FTSE100 companies now earn 145 times the average salary in their firm. With top salaries continuing to rise out of all proportion to corporate success, and certainly out of proportion to those lower down the company ladder, by 2020, those FTSE100 chief execs will be taking home 214 times the average salary. The High Pay Commission estimates that by 2025, the top 0.1per cent of earners will be earning 10 per cent of the national income. Income inequality in this country is already back to what it was in Victorian times.
This week we got a picture of the average office worker in Manchester, courtesy of a survey by Mars Drinks UK. He or she spends nine hours at work, takes less than 30 minutes break in the middle of the day, spends £2.96 on lunch eaten at desk, drinks three or four cups of tea or coffee, seldom breathes fresh air in the working day and is beset by IT hassles. It brings to mind the image of a battery chicken.
What does that average Joe or Joanna think of million pound bonuses for bankers? Well, I can tell you, because I am that average Joe, with the crumbs in the keyboard to prove it. And I regard those ever-inflating bankers' and executive salaries as obscene, not because I am jealous (which, of course, I am) but because they so skew the reward system as to offend all sense of fair play.
Such salaries as so far beyond our ken that we regard them not as something we can aspire to, but like lottery wins, or, in the bankers' case, casino windfalls. And that, surely, is corrosive to the nation's psyche.
I love a good pop reunion.
Latest to kiss and make up are Manchester's own Happy Mondays, declaring a series of gigs in May.
Will they be any cop? There's not a lot to live up to, frankly, as they were pretty shambolic even at the best of times. But what the Mondays will provide is a touchstone for nostalgia, a gathering of the middle-aged, going misty-eyed about bygone days.
The band reunion may be a money-making exercise, but it is also a recognition that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, the ego less important than the group, that human chemistry is more powerful than musical differences .
As for the fans – baggy now in face rather than trouser – they will show yet again that the music we treasure most is the soundtrack to our adolescence, that little window between childhood and adulthood when anything seems possible. That's as true of the Bieber generation as it is of the Beatles generation.
Nothing in music means quite so much to you as the song which reminds you what it was to be 16. If that song is Step On, then the Mondays' reunion will be unmissable.
What with the Stone Roses reunion and a Peter Hook-less New Order touring too, Madchester is creaking back into action
Can those other sundered titans of Manchester music, The Smiths, really continue to resist the inevitable?
Wednesday whinge
So fines from speed cameras will go up from £60 to £80 or £100 to provide more cash to aid victims of crime. A laudable aim, perhaps, but doesn't this prove the old assertion that those yellow boxes are as much about revenue-generation as crime and punishment?
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Kangaroo court of public opinion? Don't you mean a democratic opinion from a demographic public. It's much better that the peoples voices are heard than a single person supposedly representing them all. No matter how hard he is working or how good a job he's doing, Hester is working for a company which is 83% publicly owned, therefore the public have a right to voice their opinion
Interesting to note that all three, of Paul Taylor's current topics, have one thread running through them... the acquisition of money.
By whom, for whatever reason, and to what end, is irrelevant; the acquisition of wealth is one of the few symbols of modern life that crosses international boundaries of race, creed, and colour... it really is a truly global obsession.
"I don't see why someone already being paid over a million quid a year needs a “bonus”
Well if your talking about need, the government thinks minimum wage is fine for our need. I take it your only only minimum wage to otherwise, why would you need more in a differen way to how you describe him as not needing more?
Probably becuase, by and large, most educated, rational (blues) people understand the world and realise that, by & large, Stephen Hester is amongst the 0.001% elite of the population who would be capable of accepting the responsibilities of such a position and, as such, deserves the rewards he gets.
It makes me sick to hear all the bleating on here about equality, rich & poor, it's the workers that do the real work blah blah blah. Load of rubbish, why should there be equality when clearly we're not equal? You only have to read some of the comments on this subject to realise how ignorant & ill-educated the public at large are - and you think you deserve equality of pay? Justify it.
If any of you had any sense, then you would do what all "clever" people are doing and buy some RBS shares - even if you can only spare a couple of hundred pounds.
In time the price will start to creep back up and you too will be able to benefit from "Capitalism", instead of wallowing in your own self-pitty. Take control of your own destiny and make something for yourself, stop sitting around whinging and blaming everyone else for your poor existence.
I would be interested to see if Stephen Hester looks at the current shares value and thinks of jumping ship soon. Remember if those shares do not rise quickly, then forget about any return of the government money (tax payers). Were Maggie may have squandered the oil from the North sea in wealth. Blair/Brown equally fritted the wealth and dined at the city behest. Likewise with LLoyds exploits too and the pot is still empty. Not being a conspiracy theory merchant, seeing majority of problems concern the Scottish banks and were stamped by Scots as approval. No wonder Alex the dictator Salmond is smiling.
Nobody at RBS and the like should get a pay rise,let alone a bonus until the money that you and I lent to them, to save them from closing down,is repaid in full plus interest.
The alternative would have been for them all to be unemployed!
Great article. Sums up the mood of the public to bankers but what can we do? They laugh at us from their ivory towers and revel in our impotence to effect a change in their culture of greed. And as for speed cameras. By the time the army of pen pushers, IT 'consultants' and budget raiders have had their cut, how much is realistically going to be left for victim support?
The politics of envy. Want bankers pay? Work hard and become a banker.